Shortcut

Shortcut began life in 2014 in New York City as Clubhouse, founded by Kurt Schrader and Andrew Childs, who had previously worked together at ad-tech company Intent Media (where Schrader was CTO). The pair set out to build a project management and issue-tracking tool for software engineering teams that was simpler and more enjoyable to use than incumbents like Jira and Trello. After roughly a year in beta — during which TechCrunch covered the product as 'like Salesforce for the engineering team' (July 2015) — the flagship Clubhouse platform launched publicly in 2016. The company was bootstrapped initially and then raised about $4 million across two seed rounds from Resolute Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, BoxGroup, RRE Ventures, and Brooklyn Bridge Ventures (corroborated by two SEC Form D filings from Clubhouse Software, Inc. on June 21, 2016 totaling roughly $3.8M raised).

In December 2017, Clubhouse raised a $10 million Series A led by Battery Ventures, with General Partner Neeraj Agrawal joining the board; existing seed investors also participated. By late 2018, Clubhouse had raised roughly $16 million total and was serving 1,000+ organizations, including Elastic, FullStory, Glossier, HireVue, and LaunchDarkly, positioning itself as a scrappier, better-designed alternative to Atlassian's Jira. In January 2020, the company raised a $25 million Series B led by Greylock Partners (General Partner Sarah Guo led the deal and joined the board), with Battery Ventures and Lerer Hippeau also participating — covered by Forbes under the headline 'This New York Startup Just Raised $25 Million To Challenge Atlassian.'

The company's original name, Clubhouse, became a major liability after the unrelated invitation-only audio chat app Clubhouse launched on iOS in April 2020 and exploded in popularity during the pandemic. The name collision caused real confusion and business disruption — for example, in February 2021, after Elon Musk announced he would appear on the audio app, Android users mistakenly review-bombed Clubhouse Software's project-management app, forcing the company to pull it from the Play Store temporarily. On July 29–30, 2021, CEO Kurt Schrader announced via blog post that Clubhouse would rename itself Shortcut, moving from clubhouse.io to shortcut.com. The transition took effect in stages: the new shortcut.com domain went live around September 7, 2021, with the legacy app.clubhouse.io fully retired by September 13, 2021. Schrader was explicit that the rebrand was driven by the need to differentiate from the audio app's runaway popularity, not any relationship between the two companies (there was none).

Business model

B2B SaaS, freemium with paid per-seat subscription tiers

Subscription (per-user/per-seat SaaS pricing; free for up to 10 users)