Shortcut.

Shortcut sells software that most engineers would rather not think about. Project management - the tickets, the sprints, the status updates - is the connective tissue of building a product, and it is also the part teams tend to resent. The company's wager, since it started in a New York office in 2014 under the name Clubhouse, has been simple: if the tracking tool is fast enough and quiet enough, people will actually use it, and the work will move faster as a result.

The platform gives software teams a shared place to plan and ship. Work is organized into "Stories" that flow across Kanban boards; sprints are called "Iterations"; larger bodies of work roll up into Epics and Milestones, which in turn feed roadmaps. Around that core sit automations, custom workflows, a REST API, and reporting - burndown, velocity, cycle time, lead time - so managers can see progress without pulling engineers into meetings to ask for it. The result has added up: Shortcut reports more than 21 million completed stories across over 50,000 organizations.

Its customers are the people doing the building - developers, engineering managers, product managers, and designers - at companies that range from early startups to larger software organizations. What they tend to have in common is a specific frustration: they found one tool too heavy and another too rigid, and went looking for the seam in between.

Jira, the long-standing incumbent from Atlassian, can model almost any workflow - which is also why it is often described as complex, slow to configure, and heavy to live in day to day. Linear, the newer favorite, is admired for speed and design, but it is opinionated by choice: it makes decisions for you and rewards teams that adopt its defaults. Neither is wrong. But between "too much" and "too fixed" sits a large group of teams who want custom workflows and milestones without a configuration project, and clean speed without giving up flexibility.

That is the space Shortcut occupies. Reviewers consistently place it between the two: more customizable than Linear, far simpler than Jira. It is the tool teams reach for when Linear feels too constraining and Jira feels like overkill - and, notably, it competes on price and clarity rather than on having the longest feature list.

In September 2025, Shortcut introduced Korey, positioning it as the first AI product manager built for engineering workflows. Rather than bolting a chat box onto the sidebar, the company aimed the agent at the least-loved part of the job: the administrative overhead of turning a rough idea into a plan a team can actually execute. Korey drafts detailed specs, sets acceptance criteria, breaks work into tasks, maps dependencies, and reports on status - the busywork, handled.

By mid-2026 the framing had sharpened to "AI orchestration for software teams," with connectors to Slack, GitHub, and Cursor going live across plans, and roadmap plans to reach into Jira, Asana, Monday.com, Linear, Notion, and Confluence. Shortcut says early teams using Korey report moving roughly 40% faster while cutting hours of admin each week - figures worth treating as the company's own, and early.

Shortcut runs a straightforward B2B SaaS model: per-seat subscriptions across tiered plans - Free, Team, Business, and Enterprise - with published prices in the range of roughly $8.50 to $10 per user per month and custom pricing at the top. Revenue scales with seats and team count, and AI features extend what each seat is worth. Third-party sources estimate annual revenue near $4M, a figure the company has not officially confirmed.

The capital tells the strategy. Shortcut - then Clubhouse - raised about $4M across two seed rounds, then $10M in a 2017 Series A led by Battery Ventures. In January 2020 it closed a $25M Series B led by Sarah Guo at Greylock Partners, with Battery and Lerer Hippeau returning. The round drew a striking list of operator-investors: the sitting CEOs of Datadog, MongoDB, Pendo, and Flatiron Health all wrote checks - a cap table that reads like a who's who of B2B software.

Shortcut was founded by Kurt Schrader, who serves as co-founder and CEO, and Andrew Childs, who drove the original concept. The company is roughly 70 people and describes itself with five stated values: treat people right, spread joy, take ownership, be open by default, and have a bias for action. Read less as wall art and more as a hiring filter - the traits the company says it looks for and rewards.