New York-built autonomous AI project management tool — founded 2018 by Michael Villar (ex-Stripe), $18.3M raised including a $14M Series A from Redpoint Ventures, Height 2.0 launched Oct 2024 — discontinued and shut down on 24 September 2025
Height is no longer a live product. On 20 March 2025 CEO Michael Villar announced that Height — the New York-built AI-native project management tool — would be shutting down. The platform gave customers six months' notice and officially went offline on 24 September 2025. The shutdown came just five months after the October 2024 launch of Height 2.0, marketed as the world's first "autonomous project collaboration tool" with an embedded AI reasoning engine. Height was founded in 2018 in New York City by Michael Villar, a former early engineer and product designer at Stripe, and raised approximately $18.3 million in total funding, including a $14 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures in October 2021. For Indian product teams that were using Height as a Linear / Asana alternative, the migration window has now closed — if you have not exported your data and moved, your workspace is gone. This page exists as a historical record and an alternatives guide. For new adoption in 2026 the closest replacements depending on your team profile are Linear (engineering-led teams), Shortcut (product-engineering teams), ClickUp (broader feature set, similar pricing) and Notion (small / solo PM teams).
Height was a fast, keyboard-first project management tool built for product and engineering teams — frequently compared to Linear and Asana, but with an aggressive bet on AI as the primary interface from 2023 onwards. The product had two distinct lives. The first was Height 1.0, a Linear-style task tracker with chat-native task creation, multiple views (list, kanban, calendar, Gantt), GitHub / Slack / Figma integrations, and a developer-friendly UX that won early traction among YC-stage startups, product teams, and small Indian engineering shops looking for a lighter alternative to Jira.
The second life was Height 2.0, announced and launched in October 2024. CEO Michael Villar described it as a complete ground-up rebuild rather than an iteration: an "autonomous project collaboration tool" that embedded a reasoning engine across the workspace to automatically triage bugs, write status updates, clean up lists, and keep product documents in sync. Height 2.0 introduced dedicated Teams spaces, integrated Documents for specs and notes, and the full suite of agentic AI features marketed as "an AI teammate that does the legwork of PM". It was a genuinely interesting product — possibly ahead of its time — and the bet was that AI would absorb most of the manual project-management overhead that humans were doing in Jira and Linear.
The company was founded in 2018 and headquartered in New York City. The founder and CEO was Michael Villar, who had been an early engineer and product designer at Stripe before starting Height, with a prior productivity-startup co-founding experience as well. The Stripe pedigree showed up in Height's craft: the product was beautifully polished, fast, and design-led, in the same way Linear's UX was. Height raised approximately $18.3 million in total funding, with the headline round being a $14 million Series A in October 2021 led by Redpoint Ventures, which the company used to open up Height to public sign-ups and accelerate hiring.
Height was publicly available for roughly three and a half years — from the 2021 public launch to the September 2025 shutdown. At peak it had a free tier, a Team plan at ~$6.99/user/month, and a Business plan at ~$11.99/user/month, billed annually. For Indian teams, all billing was in USD with 18% IGST, and there was no local presence or INR option, which meant most Indian adoption was at the small-team / startup level rather than enterprise.
The company did not publish a detailed post-mortem, but the wind-down note in March 2025 framed it as one of the "hardest decisions" the founder had ever made. The implied story, pieced together from the timeline and the broader market, has three threads:
1. Linear ate the engineering-led market. Through 2022–2024 Linear scaled from a niche tool into the default project tracker for venture-backed startups globally, including in India. Height's original positioning — fast, keyboard-first, design-led — overlapped almost perfectly with Linear's, and Linear had more capital, faster shipping velocity, and a stronger founder brand. Every Indian Y-Combinator-stage startup that would have been Height's natural customer was already on Linear by 2024.
2. Height 2.0's autonomous-AI bet was hard to monetise. Embedding a reasoning engine in every workspace turned out to be expensive on inference cost while the customer willingness-to-pay for "AI does my PM work" was not yet at the level that would cover those costs at $7–$12/user/month. The 2024 pivot was bold, but the gap between "AI demo is impressive" and "AI replaces enough PM work to justify a price uplift" is wider than the launch positioning suggested.
3. Funding-environment compression. The 2022–2024 SaaS funding environment punished growth-stage companies with limited revenue and high R&D burn. Height, having raised an $18.3M total and built a heavyweight AI architecture, was not in the financial shape to ride out a 24-month bridge to product-market-fit on the autonomous-AI thesis. Bootstrapped product-management companies — Aha! at $100M+ ARR, for instance — survived this period precisely because they did not need the next round.
The result was a six-month sunset announced March 2025, a final shutdown on 24 September 2025, and a small but motivated user base scattered across Linear, Shortcut, ClickUp and Notion. For Indian product teams the practical lesson is unrelated to AI: any venture-funded SaaS tool with a single-digit-million ARR runway is one strategy pivot away from a shutdown letter. Procurement diligence in 2026 should factor "what's their funded runway" alongside features and price.
Like Linear, Height was relentlessly fast. Cmd-K command palette, every action keyboard-accessible, almost no mouse needed. Developers loved it; PMs migrating from Asana usually needed a week to adapt.
Built-in chat in every task that wasn't a slack-tab afterthought. Conversations stayed with the work, not in a parallel channel — one of the more genuinely differentiated decisions in the category.
From 2023, Height Copilot could triage bugs, suggest labels, auto-summarise threads, and draft release notes. Height 2.0 extended this into fully autonomous backlog upkeep and live product documents — ahead of where most competitors were in 2024.
Solid view switching across the same dataset. PMs got the timeline / Gantt view, engineers got the kanban, leadership got the calendar / portfolio view. No view felt like an afterthought.
The standard product-engineering integration set, well-implemented. Auto-linked PR statuses, Slack notifications, Figma previews in task cards — all worked without configuration friction.
Stripe-pedigree founder team showed up in the UI craft. Animations, typography, micro-interactions all felt deliberate. This is one of the things the migrating customer base specifically mentions losing.
Pricing below is from Height's last live pricing page in early 2025 and is no longer purchasable. Included so that buyers comparing alternatives have a sense of the price band Height occupied:
For Indian buyers, all of the above were in USD with 18% IGST added on top — there was no INR billing option and no FIRA-friendly invoicing for software-export adjustments. The Team tier converted to roughly ₹600–₹700/user/month all-in, which positioned Height between Asana Business and Linear Standard.
Height is the right call only as a case study in how to wind down a SaaS product responsibly: the team gave six months' notice, published a clear shutdown date, and let customers export. That is the bar Indian SaaS founders should hold themselves to if they ever have to make the same call.
G2 and most independent reviewers rank ClickUp as the closest pricing-and-feature match for ex-Height customers. Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) is the closest philosophical match for product-engineering teams that valued Height's focused workflow. Linear is the closest match for the keyboard-first / design-led UX, and is the most common destination for Indian YC-stage startups migrating off Height.