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Linear

Project ManagementFounded 2019
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Company data updated: October 2026

Founders

Who Founded Linear?

Karri Saarinen, Jori Lallo, Tuomas Artman · Founded 2019 · HQ today: San Francisco, California, United States

Who founded Linear?

Linear was founded by Karri Saarinen, Jori Lallo, Tuomas Artman in 2019. It is now led by Karri Saarinen.

Founders
Karri Saarinen, Jori Lallo, Tuomas Artman
Founded
2019
Headquarters
San Francisco, California, United States
Number of founders
3
Current CEO
Karri Saarinen (since 2019)
Where was Linear founded?
Linear was founded in San Francisco, California in 2019.
When was Linear founded?
Linear was founded in 2019.
Who started Linear?
Linear was founded by Karri Saarinen, Jori Lallo and Tuomas Artman.
How old is Linear?
Linear is 7 years old as of 2026.

Founding Story

Karri Saarinen, a designer who had worked at Airbnb and Coinbase, was frustrated with Jira; at Airbnb he even built a Chrome extension to make it more bearable. He teamed up with Jori Lallo, his earlier co-founder at Kippt and a Coinbase engineer, and Tuomas Artman, an engineer at Uber. They incorporated Linear on January 10, 2019, opened a waitlist in April 2019 and raised a $4.2 million round led by Sequoia that November.

Karri Saarinen

Co-founder 2019

Background

Former Principal Designer at Airbnb and Coinbase.

Role at Linear

Karri Saarinen co-founded Linear in 2019. Frustrated by the incredibly slow, bloated nature of Jira while working at massive tech unicorns, he realized developers despised the tools they were forced to use. As CEO, he obsessively focused on building a deeply aesthetic, lightning-fast issue tracker that developers would actually love using, effectively treating B2B software with consumer-grade design standards. Karri Saarinen was born in 1983.

Jori Lallo

Co-founder 2019

Background

Software engineer and former Coinbase employee.

Role at Linear

Jori Lallo co-founded Linear in 2019 alongside his former Coinbase colleague Karri Saarinen. He played an absolutely critical role in engineering the highly complex sync engine that allows Linear to operate incredibly fast offline and instantly sync changes across all users globally without lag. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Tuomas Artman

Co-founder 2019

Background

Former Uber engineering manager and iOS architect.

Role at Linear

Tuomas Artman co-founded Linear in 2019. Drawing on his massive experience optimizing the mobile architecture at Uber, he architected Linear's incredibly fast, C++ based sync engine. He specifically ensured the application felt instantaneous by aggressively pre-loading data locally on the user's machine, completely bypassing the massive loading times of legacy web apps. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Linear: CEO & Leadership History

Full timeline →

Karri Saarinen

Co-founder & CEO

2019 – Present

Saarinen was previously the first designer at Coinbase and Principal Designer at Airbnb, where he created Airbnb's influential Design Language System (DLS). His craft-first philosophy transformed modern developer tools.

Tuomas Artman

Co-Founder

2019 – 2024

As Co-Founder and chief technical architect, he ensures the platform maintains absolute performance superiority over Jira, directly appealing to highly impatient, elite software engineers.

Keep researching Linear

Who Founded Linear? FAQ

Who founded Linear and what were their background experiences in Silicon Valley?

Linear was founded in 2019 by Karri Saarinen, Jori Lallo, and Tuomas Artman. Saarinen and Lallo previously co-founded Kippt (YC W12) and held senior design/engineering roles at Coinbase; Artman was a Principal Engineer at Uber leading mobile architecture.

What frustrates the founders about traditional project management tools like Jira?

Having worked at high-growth scaleups (Airbnb, Coinbase, Uber), the founders were frustrated that engineering teams spent hours configuring slow, bloated, bureaucratic tools (like Jira) that hindered developer productivity rather than accelerating software shipping.

How was Linear built and tested in its initial private beta phase in 2019?

In 2019, the three founders wrote the initial codebase from scratch, launching an exclusive private beta for top Silicon Valley design and engineering teams (including Vercel, Pitch, and Netlify), refining keyboard shortcuts and local-first sync before public launch in 2020.

What was the technical challenge of building Linear's local-first sync engine?

Co-founder Tuomas Artman engineered a custom synchronization protocol using SQLite and WebAssembly in the browser, solving complex distributed conflict resolution to ensure that multiple engineers could edit tasks simultaneously with zero merge conflicts.

Who were the early angel investors who backed the founders in 2019?

In November 2019, Sequoia Capital led Linear's $4.2 million seed round, joined by tech leaders including Patrick Collison (Stripe), Dylan Field (Figma), Soleio Cuervo (early Facebook designer), and Elad Gil.

How did the founders' Nordic heritage influence Linear's design aesthetic?

Hailing from Finland, the founders infused Scandinavian design principles into Linear: minimalism, functional clarity, elegant typography, natural proportions, and the elimination of superfluous visual noise.

When did Linear officially launch to the public?

Following its private beta, Linear officially launched publicly in June 2020, instantly becoming a viral sensation among software engineers and winning Product Hunt's Product of the Day and Golden Kitty awards.

What is the founding ethos of 'Building for Builders'?

The founders established the ethos that Linear is built by software craftsmen for software craftsmen, ensuring that every design decision prioritizes developer happiness, focus, and high-velocity shipping.

Who founded Linear?

It was founded by a highly elite trio: Karri Saarinen, Tuomas Artman, and Jori Lallo. Artman and Lallo were both incredibly senior engineers (having worked at massive tech giants like Uber and Coinbase). Their massive technical pedigree allowed them to build a highly complex, ultra-fast syncing engine (using GraphQL and heavily optimized local caching) that makes Linear feel faster than native desktop apps.

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Content is for informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Data sourced from SEC filings, annual reports, and public records. See our full disclaimer and methodology.