LinkedIn

LinkedIn operates a professional network where people find jobs, build connections, share industry knowledge, and learn skills. Job seekers can signal availability through Open To Work, while employers post vacancies and recruiters use AI tools for hiring. LinkedIn Learning offers courses spanning business, software development, and artificial intelligence. Its Hiring Assistant is an AI agent designed to handle repetitive recruiting tasks.

Founded by Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Jean-Luc Vaillant, Eric Ly, and Konstantin Guericke, LinkedIn launched in 2003; Dan Shapero is its current CEO. Its engineering contributions include Kafka, a distributed message queue developed internally and open-sourced in 2011. Built to transport large volumes of website activity events with low overhead and horizontal scaling, Kafka supported both real-time services and offline analytics through the same infrastructure.

Microsoft completed its acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016 for a total purchase price of $27.0 billion. LinkedIn’s business includes marketing solutions and Premium alongside its hiring products. The company reported $19.8 billion in FY2026 annual revenue and, in July 2026, recruiters at more than 20,000 companies using its AI-powered hiring solutions. Its company statistics page listed more than 1.3 billion members as of August 2026.