- Bug tracking platform company Linear announced that it raised $4.2 million in seed funding. These are the details.
Bug tracking platform Linear announced recently that it raised a $4.2 million seed round of funding led by Sequoia with participation also from Index Ventures and several angel investors, and startup founders, according to TechCrunch. These investors include Sigma founder and CEO Dylan Field, Coinbase COO Emilie Choi, Expo and Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever, Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alströmer, Parse co-founder Tikhon Bernstam, Envoy CEO Larry Gadea, Golden CEO Jude Gomila, Bugsnag CEO James Smith, Rainforest CEO Fred Stevens-Smith, Bobby Goodlatte, Marc McCabe, Julia DeWahl, and several others.
Founded by Karri Saarinen, Tuomas Artman, and Jori Lallo, Linear have experience working with distributed teams. Saarinen was previously the principal designer of Airbnb as well as the first designer of Coinbase. Artman was a staff engineer and architect at Uber, and Lallo worked at Coinbase as a senior engineer building its API and front end.
“When we worked at many startups and growth companies we felt that the tools weren’t matching the way we’re thinking or operating,” said Saarinen in an email interview with TechCrunch. “It also seemed that no-one had took a fresh look at this as a design problem. We believe there is a much better, modern workflow waiting to be discovered. We believe creators should focus on the work they create, not tracking or reporting what they are doing. Managers should spend their time prioritizing and giving direction, not bugging their teams for updates. Running the process shouldn’t sap your team’s energy and come in the way of creating.”
Linear’s bug tracking software makes it easier to review the status of bugs, assign tasks, and it also supports offline work. Plus it also has a dark mode.
Sequoia Capital partner Stephanie Zhan led this funding round in Linear. And Zhan first learned about Linear when it was launched in private beta. Some of the companies that use Linear include Pitch, Render, Albert, Curology, Spoke, Compound, and several Y Combinator companies.
“The interesting thing about Linear is that as they’re building a software company around the future of work, they’re also building a remote and distributed team themselves,” Zhan explained via TechCrunch.
