Plane's open-source Jira bet: $4M seed, 58.7k GitHub stars, #1 trending

Plane is an open-source project management platform founded in November 2022 by brothers Vamsi and Vihar Kurama, headquartered in Delaware and India. Their bet: teams tired of proprietary tooling would choose a self-hostable Jira, Linear, Monday and ClickUp alternative they could own, audit and run in air-gapped environments - with privacy and code transparency as the selling points, not just price.

The company started the way many open-source projects do: the repo came first. The Kurama brothers had built an internal tool to manage clients at their previous IT consulting company, released it on GitHub under AGPL-3.0 before the formal launch, and let the developer community do the distribution. A Hacker News launch post reached the front page at #2, and by December 2023 Plane claimed the top spot among project-management repos on GitHub, with about 20,000 stars and a 297-point HN thread on the milestone.

In April 2024, OSS Capital - the commercial-open-source specialist fund led by Joseph Jacks - invested $4M in a seed round announced alongside Plane One, a $799 one-time perpetual license for self-managed instance owners. TechCrunch's 2023 profile had already framed the pitch: full data control, auditable code, and an AGPL license chosen from day one rather than imposed later, with dual-licensing as a future enterprise option.

By October 2025 the founders were repositioning Plane as an AI-native alternative to Jira in an HN post citing ~39.3k stars, and by September 2026 the repo had reached 58.7k stars, had trended for 100 days total, and hit #1 on GitHub's TypeScript trending list in August 2026 - still seed-funded, still growing through open-source distribution.