Linear Series A · 2026

Investor Memo · Confidential

The issue tracker
engineers actually use.

Linear is the system of record for modern software teams. Built for speed, designed for craft, and on track to do $15M ARR — growing 4× year over year.

Round

Series A · $35M

Stage

Post-product-market fit

Prepared for

Lead investors

— I · The Problem Linear · Series A

Project management is still broken for software teams.

Engineers spend their days in a tool they didn't choose, designed for a workflow they don't follow. The cost is measured in hours, context-switches, and the velocity of every shipping team on earth.

"We tried Jira for two years. Half the eng team kept a parallel spreadsheet just to know what was actually being worked on."

— VP Engineering · 400-person SaaS

23%

of dev time lost to tool friction*

8.4

avg tools per engineering team*

$61B

annual productivity loss, global*

— II · The Solution Linear · Series A

Built for the way modern software actually gets shipped.

One opinionated tool — issues, sprints, projects, roadmaps — fast enough that engineers open it on purpose.

01

Sub-50ms everywhere

A local-first sync engine. No spinners, no stale state, no "it's loading" excuse.

02

Opinionated by default

Cycles, triage, and projects work out of the box. No six-week JIRA admin onboarding.

03

Built for the IDE generation

Keyboard-first, GitHub-native, API-deep. Works the way your engineers already do.

Product · In customer hands today

"It's the first tool I've used where the team fights to keep using it."

— III · Traction Linear · Series A

$15M ARR and growing 4× year over year.

ARR

$15M

↑ 312% YoY

Paid Teams

10,400

↑ 4.1× in 12 months

Net Revenue Retention

142%

Top decile for SaaS

Gross Margin

86%

Payback in 9 months

— Customers shipping on Linear today

Vercel Ramp Cash App Loom Mercury Retool Brex

— IV · Market Linear · Series A

A $12B market still run on Jira.

Atlassian alone does $4B in software-PM revenue. The next decade of issue-tracking dollars are up for grabs — and the buyers are the same engineers already opening Linear on the side.

TAM · 2030

$48B

Global developer-collaboration software, all categories.

SAM

$12B

Issue tracking + project management for software teams.

— SOM · 5 yr

$1.4B

Modern, design-led teams replacing Jira by 2030.

— Why now

"AI-native development is rewriting every engineering workflow. Teams switching toolchains in 2026 will pick the tool that's fast, opinionated, and built for agents — not the one built for 2008."

— V · The Ask Linear · Series A

$35M Series A to make Linear the standard.

Round size · $35M

Pre-money · $400M

Closing · Q1 2026

— Participating

Strategic

$2–5M

Allocation · 4 slots

Pro-rata in future rounds
Quarterly metrics packet
Customer-intro pipeline
Observer rights

— Recommended · Lead

Lead Investor

$20M

1 slot · 57% of round

Board seat + term-setting
Pro-rata + super pro-rata
Monthly KPI reviews with founders
Co-marketing on Series A close
First look at Series B

— Co-lead

Co-Lead

$10M

1 slot · 29% of round

Board observer
Pro-rata in future rounds
Monthly metrics review
Joint announcement at close

— VI · Product in motion Linear · Series A

See it move at sub-50ms.

A 30-second walkthrough of the keyboard-first flow — issue creation, triage, and shipping a cycle without ever leaving the keyboard.

The issue trackerengineers actually use.

Linear — presentation by ProductHunt on Burndecks