Plane, a commercial open source project management start-up out of Delaware and India, has raised $4M in seed funding to accelerate product, engineering, and go-to-market for its flexible, quickstart software that now holds the top spot in its category globally on GitHub.

Founded in November, 2022 by brothers Vamsi Kurama and Vihar Kurama, Plane aims to simplify projects by being flexible and easy to use for teams of all sizes across industry verticals.

Plane offers a no-hoops onboarding, clean interfaces, and simple workflows to the modern knowledge worker that wants the familiarity of well-oiled processes combined with the flexibility of cross-functional collaboration.

For example, you can create an entire product roadmap in minutes, either top down, starting with a project and filling it up with tasks, called Issues, or going bottom-up with individual tasks first and then grouping them into time boxes called Cycles, logical parents called Modules, or just the overall project.

While Plane’s strength is being flexible about almost everything for its most popular use cases, its biggest is that it can be self-hosted and -managed. “Almost all of our most active and committed users are on self-managed instances and contribute actively to the roadmap”, claims Vihar, the younger Kurama.

The seed round has been funded solely by OSS Capital, the only early-stage investors in commercial open source software like Cal.com, Remix, and Documenso.

Joseph Jacks, the Founder and General Partner of OSS Capital, believes Plane is uniquely positioned to disrupt the crowded project management software space dominated by “inflexible, closed and extractive, legacy products” that “customers can’t wait to drop like hot potatoes.”

"Modern teams, especially after the pandemic, want software that meets them at their most comfortable," said Jacks, adding, "They are tired of tools that mandate 12 to 20 onboarding screens, thousands of configurations, and the need to onboard everyone on your team before you can even play with the product. Plane cuts to the chase and helps teams, often within the same company, choose how they want to track and manage progress.”

That is evident in how swiftly the project has secured the top spot on GitHub in its category, even while still in public alpha. This rapid growth has enabled Plane to become more ambitious in its roadmap and vision. Originally starting as an internal tool for Vamsi's previous product consulting start-up, Plane now boasts a slew of planned features like,

• Vault, that will help software engineering teams store and share authentication secrets across members and teams
• Publish, that will help share docs, knowledge bases, and roadmaps externally, and
• Box, a shared file storage for teams

“Our vision is to be the one-stop product for all modern work needs across teams, companies, and industries. These early features are progressive steps towards reaching that vision”, Vamsi clarifies.

Plane is an early-stage project management software start-up that offers simple, easy cross-functional collaboration for modern teams. The company is headquartered in Delaware and India.

OSS Capital is a venture capital firm specializing in early-stage investments in commercial open-source software. They focus on supporting innovative projects that leverage open-source development models. The firm is known for backing companies that disrupt traditional software markets with their community-driven approaches.