Deepening Our Investment in Linear: The digital connectivity between engineers and agents

Accel is leading Linear’s $99m employee tender, valuing the company at $2.5 billion. This is our third consecutive investment in Linear, placing it on a short list of companies we’ve backed three times: Anthropic, CrowdStrike, Cursor, Cyera, Slack, Vercel.

When we first partnered with Karri, Jori, and Tuomas, we were impressed by the organic adoption of the product and the distinct level of craftsmanship that shaped everything the team produced. When we doubled our commitment to Linear, we marveled at the rapid adoption by large enterprises. Today we are struck by Linear’s positioning as the heartbeat of AI-forward product organizations. This latest investment reflects our renewed conviction that Linear is building a generational company.

Linear is the digital connectivity between engineers and agents. It gives agents the critical context they need to perform their work, while also sitting alongside coding tools to provide a working record of their output. Over the last six months, we’ve observed usage of Linear evolve from human-centric to agent-centric, with more than half of issues in Linear now authored by AI. The most striking reflection of Linear’s centrality to the AI ecosystem is the number of its customers who are themselves pushing the frontier of AI: Cursor, Cognition, Baseten, Decagon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft AI, Lovable, Sierra, Perplexity, Harvey, ElevenLabs, Physical Intelligence, and more.

Karri and I often talk about the “eight year principle,” a rough rule of thumb to describe the compounding effect of great PLG companies: the very best take eight years to reach scale, and just 1–2 to triple from there. Linear hit every milestone ahead of schedule and has grown 25x since our first meeting, profitably. More impressively, Linear has accomplished this all in its own unique style, stamping everything it does with taste and quality.

This tender allows the talented Linear team to participate in the value they have created. It’s incredibly well deserved. If you want to join the best product team of the AI era, Linear is hiring.