Karri Saarinen
Co-Founder & CEO, Linear
Reviewed Updated Jun 12, 2026This profile is AI-generated. If you spot an error, please help us fix it by sharing a URL to the correct information.
Background
Karri Saarinen is a Finnish-born designer-turned-founder, currently Co-Founder and CEO of Linear, the issue-tracking and product development tool he started in 2019 with Tuomas Artman (CTO) and Jori Lallo (CPO) 1. Before Linear, Saarinen was Principal Designer and co-creator of the design systems team at Airbnb, and earlier the founding designer (and Head of Design) at Coinbase 23.
Earlier in his career he co-founded Kippt (a Y Combinator-backed bookmarking startup) and the educational nonprofit Rails Girls, and contributed to projects including the Airbnb Cereal typeface and the Lottie animation library 2. He relocated from San Francisco to Del Mar, California (north of San Diego) in 2020 4.
Linear has raised approximately $134M across four rounds and reached unicorn status in 2025 with an $82M Series C 5. Alongside running Linear, Saarinen makes occasional angel investments in design- and craft-driven developer tools and productivity software 678.
Stated Thesis
Saarinen does not publish a formal angel-investing thesis. His public writing and interviews focus on what he calls “craft” — the deliberate pursuit of quality as a product strategy. In a Figma essay he argues:
“Quality isn’t binary — it’s about continuously refining a product to meet a standard.” 9
“For quality, you need a team that views the spec as the baseline, not the finish line.” 9
“The best design is opinionated.” 9
His investments to date map closely to companies that share this aesthetic-and-engineering posture — purpose-built, design-led developer and productivity tools (Raycast, Granola, Foxglove) — but Saarinen has not framed this publicly as a deliberate “thesis” the way professional VCs do 678.
Inferred Thesis
Sample size is small (3 publicly verified angel investments), so percentages are not meaningful — qualitative description only.
Across the three publicly verified angel checks, every company shares a tightly overlapping profile:
- Sector: All three are productivity/developer tools with a strong design and craft orientation. Raycast is a keyboard-driven productivity launcher, Granola is an AI note-taking app, Foxglove builds visualization tools for robotics developers 678.
- Stage: All three checks went into seed or Series A rounds led by established VCs (Accel/Coatue at Raycast, Amplify at Foxglove, NFDG at Granola Series B follow-on) — Saarinen comes in as a small operator-angel alongside other founders 678.
- Co-investor pattern: He repeatedly appears alongside founder-angels in the same craft-driven cohort: Koen Bok (Framer), David Cramer (Sentry), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Amjad Masad (Replit), Tobi Lütke (Shopify), Des Traynor (Intercom), Zach Lloyd (Warp), Lenny Rachitsky 78.
- Geography: US- and UK-based companies, distributed/remote-leaning teams (Granola is UK-based) 68.
- Founder profile: Technical and/or design founders building tools they themselves want to use — a pattern that mirrors Linear’s own origin story.
Gap: Saarinen is not a prolific angel. Aggregators list only 4 disclosed investments through May 2025 6. Founders should expect his involvement to be selective and low-touch rather than a programmatic deployment.
Portfolio
| Company | Year | Stage | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raycast | 2021 | Series A ($15M, led by Accel & Coatue) | 7 |
| Foxglove | 2022 | Seed ($3.7M, led by Amplify Partners) | 8 |
| Granola | 2025-05-14 | Series B ($43M, led by NFDG, $250M valuation) | 101113 |
Aggregators list a fourth disclosed investment in Dot Product (2024), but the round was undisclosed and no contemporaneous press release naming Saarinen could be located at the time of research 6. Excluded from the table pending primary-source verification.
Sample size: 3 verified investments — too small for reliable percentage breakdowns.
In Their Own Words
On building Linear and quality as a strategy:
“We started with quality. Then we learned that people actually noticed, because it’s a rare approach — especially for startups.” 9
On how he thinks about meeting a user’s bar:
“You have to match that level of capability or quality, otherwise people just don’t pay attention.” 9
On product opinion:
“The best design is opinionated.” 9
On fundraising philosophy (in a thread about how he approached Linear’s rounds):
“This is what I did with first company. But then with Linear have done opposite. Not starting fundraising until there is already lot of interest. Then only engaging with the few investors that seem a good fit. To this day we never needed to fundraise, in the beginning we could…” 12
On Granola, explaining why he invested and uses it:
“For me, @meetgranola was one of those things that just clicked instantly. It’s seamless and very purpose-built. I like that it’s a focused app that sits on the side, and the notes don’t disappear into some endless pile of miscellaneous information and docs.” 13
On Carta (after the secondary-share outreach incident in early 2024), a public statement that signaled how he thinks about founder/investor trust:
“This might be the end of @cartainc as the trusted platform for startups. As a founder it feels kind shitty that Carta, who I trust to manage our cap table, is now doing cold outreach to our angel investors about selling Linear shares to their buyers.” 14
What Founders Say
No independently sourced founder testimonials about working with Karri Saarinen as an angel investor were found at the time of research. Portfolio founders (Raycast, Foxglove, Granola) have publicly named him as a backer in their funding announcements 7810, but none of the surfaced press contains a verbatim quote from a founder describing Saarinen’s post-investment behavior or value-add.
Sources
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Linear, “About,” accessed June 2026. https://linear.app/about↩
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Karri Saarinen, personal website, accessed June 2026. https://karrisaarinen.com/↩↩
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Lenny’s Newsletter / Lenny’s Podcast, “Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO),” October 8, 2023, accessed June 2026. https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-linear-building-with-taste↩
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Fred Grier / Business San Diego (Medium), “Karri Saarinen: Talks Leaving SF and Building a $400M Startup in San Diego’s Backyard,” accessed June 2026. https://medium.com/@fredgrier/karri-saarinen-talks-leaving-sf-and-building-a-400m-startup-in-san-diegos-backyard-6a0e8db8d35a↩
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Tracxn, “Linear — Company Profile, Team, Funding & Competitors,” accessed June 2026. https://tracxn.com/d/companies/linear/__xC97n-jdX7VZjDBpNyRfVH-H_Elzu354nD5Yz5FaUVI↩
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Tracxn, “Karri Saarinen — Portfolio & Founded Companies,” accessed June 2026. https://tracxn.com/d/people/karri-saarinen/__izf3sLU5YHX600NV3m8HKRyj0UfeColjifwytI2n2OY↩↩↩↩↩↩↩
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Raycast Blog, “$15M Series A to make work frictionless,” November 30, 2021, accessed June 2026. https://www.raycast.com/blog/series-a↩↩↩↩↩↩↩
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Foxglove Blog, “Foxglove Raises $3.7M to Build Better Developer Tools For Robotics,” January 2022, accessed June 2026. https://foxglove.dev/blog/foxglove-raises-seed-funding-3-7m↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩
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Figma Blog, “Karri Saarinen’s 10 rules for crafting products that stand out,” accessed June 2026. https://www.figma.com/blog/karri-saarinens-10-rules-for-crafting-products-that-stand-out/↩↩↩↩↩↩
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BusinessWire, “Granola Launches AI Workspace for Teams and Raises $43M Series B,” May 14, 2025, accessed June 2026. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250514342646/en/Granola-Launches-AI-Workspace-for-Teams-and-Raises-$43M-Series-B↩↩
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The SaaS News, “Granola Raises $43 Million in Series B,” May 2025, accessed June 2026. https://www.thesaasnews.com/news/granola-raises-43-million-in-series-b/↩
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Karri Saarinen on X, post about Linear’s fundraising approach, August 14, 2024, accessed June 2026. https://x.com/karrisaarinen/status/1823980426332942484↩
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Karri Saarinen on X, post about Granola, May 14, 2025, accessed June 2026. https://x.com/karrisaarinen/status/1922668975164461079↩↩
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Karri Saarinen on X, post about Carta secondary outreach, January 5, 2024, accessed June 2026. https://x.com/karrisaarinen/status/174339855350097133↩