ClickUp

Productivity SoftwareFounded 2017

Market Data Current As Of: September 12, 2026

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ClickUp

Productivity SoftwareFounded 2017

Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya

Last reviewed: September 12, 2026

Market Data Current As Of: September 12, 2026

Founders

Who Founded ClickUp?

Zeb Evans, Alex Yurkowski · Founded 2017 · San Diego, California, United States

Quick Answer

ClickUp was founded by Zeb Evans, Alex Yurkowski in 2017 in San Diego, California, United States.

Founding Story

In 2016, Zeb Evans was running FastPayroll, an online payroll and HR software company in Silicon Valley. Evans noticed that his team was wasting hours every day copying information between Asana, Trello, Slack, and Google Docs. Recognizing that existing project management apps were rigid and single-purpose, Evans and his technical co-founder Alex Yurkowski began building an internal tool to manage all company operations in one place. When other startup founders visited their office and saw the software, they begged to use it for their own companies. In early 2017, Evans and Yurkowski made the bold decision to shut down FastPayroll, move their team to San Diego, and invest their remaining capital into incorporating ClickUp. Bootstrapping the company for its first three years, they focused on shipping new features every single week, engaging directly with users on Reddit and social media. When ClickUp raised its $35M Series A from Craft Ventures in 2020, it was already generating tens of millions in profitable ARR, setting off a historic hypergrowth trajectory.

Zeb Evans

Role at ClickUp

Zeb Evans is an American serial entrepreneur, technology visionary, and business executive who founded ClickUp in 2017 and serves as its CEO. Born and raised in North Carolina, Evans demonstrated entrepreneurial ambition from childhood, launching multiple online businesses in high school and college. While attending Virginia Tech, a severe medical emergency and near-fatal home invasion profoundly altered his perspective on mortality, instilling an intense sense of urgency to maximize every day. Prior to ClickUp, Evans founded FastPayroll, an online payroll and HR software company. Frustrated by the dozen disconnected tools his team had to use, Evans shut down FastPayroll to build ClickUp. Bootstrapping the company in San Diego, Evans drove ClickUp's explosive rise into a $4.0 billion unicorn serving over 10 million users, championing the mission to 'Save 1 day every week'.

Alex Yurkowski

Role at ClickUp

Alex Yurkowski is an American software engineer, systems architect, and technology entrepreneur who co-founded ClickUp in 2017. Yurkowski partnered with Zeb Evans at FastPayroll, leading software engineering and backend systems architecture. When the team pivoted to build ClickUp, Yurkowski architected the foundational data schemas and real-time collaboration engines that allowed ClickUp to support tasks, docs, and spreadsheets within a single database substrate. As technical co-founder, Yurkowski has played a crucial leadership role in guiding ClickUp's engineering organization through hypergrowth and overseeing the development of ClickUp 3.0's distributed architecture.

Who Founded ClickUp? FAQ

Who founded ClickUp and in what year was it established?

ClickUp was founded in 2017 by Zeb Evans, Alex Yurkowski in San Diego, California, United States.

What was the original founding vision for ClickUp?

The founders established ClickUp with the objective of solving core inefficiencies in Productivity Software, Project Management, Collaboration, Enterprise SaaS, Workflow Automation & All-in-One Work Platforms, laying the foundation for its current global scale.