Clubhouse Software was founded in 2014, with the aim of “bringing more transparency and predictive models to the process of software engineering”.[4] After a year in beta, its flagship product, a project management platform called Clubhouse, was launched in 2016.
In December 2017, Clubhouse raised US$10 million in Series A round of funding, led by Battery Ventures.[1] Previous to this, the company had raised US$4 million across two rounds of seed funding from Resolute Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, BoxGroup, RRE Ventures, and Brooklyn Bridge Ventures.[1]
In January 2020, Clubhouse raised US$25 million in Series B round of funding, led by Greylock Partners. The round which included previous investors Battery Ventures and Lerer Hippeau, valued Clubhouse at US$100 million.[5]
The company has no relationship with the invitation-only audio-chat app of the same name which launched on iOS in April 2020.[6] The identical names of the two apps has regularly caused confusion since the chat app's launch. For example, in February 2021, after Elon Musk announced that he would make an appearance on the platform, Android users looking for the chat service review bombed Clubhouse Software's Android app, causing the company to pull the app temporarily.[7]
On July 29, 2021, the company announced it would be changing its company and product name to Shortcut, effective mid-September, citing challenges in maintaining its prior brand following the growth of the Clubhouse chat app.[8]
Product
Clubhouse
Clubhouse is a commercial software product for project management and issue tracking. It includes features to track and plan user stories, plan software development sprints, visualize work in progress with kanban boards, and report on progress of work.[9] Clubhouse is also free for up to 10 users.[10]
Clubhouse is written in Clojure, with a custom JavaScript front end.[11] Its features can also be accessed using a REST API. The Clubhouse API was noted in 2019 as "one of the most talked about APIs" by ProgrammableWeb.[12]