Developer tools change quickly with AI. Thus, companies that facilitate the adoption of AI in their workflows see a boom of attention. After a startup called N8n (pronounced “Enay-Ten”) pivoted his automation platform for workflow to become more suitable for AI in 2022, he said he saw his income increase by 5x, dubbing in the past two months.
Now, on the back of this growth, Techcrunch has confirmed that N8N had raised 55 million euros ($ 60 million) in funding on evaluation sources close to Tell US is in the region of 250 million euros ($ 270 million).
N8N, based in Berlin, said that it now has more than 3,000 business customers and around 200,000 active users in his books. The startup will use this series B to continue investing in technology and developing in more recent markets such as the United States, which houses more than half of N8N’s user database. The company does not disclose income and this customer number includes both free and paid users, as well as those who take short and longer term subscriptions.
Highland Europe directs this last round, with HV Capital and the previous donors Sequoia, Felicis and Harpoon also participating. Sequoia led the Tour des Graines for N8N in 2020; Felicis series A in 2021.
The startup, founded in 2019, resumed the traction in its first years with developer teams who sought low -code automation solutions and without code to facilitate the cushion of applications together in a way without much expensive coding.
He also drew attention to another reason: N8N had built a reputation by being closely linked to the concept of “fair code. “”
Fair Code is an progression of the open source. Software developers use open source code free of charge, but when they want to market work built in addition, it establishes principles to compensate for creators or the open source community. Jan Oberhauser, the founder and CEO of N8N, had the idea and directs a site dedicated to the fair code.
But while N8N itself is built on a fair code and leans in the open source community to grow by word of mouth – it has more than 70,000 “stars” on Github – the company says that it has woven in AI which has become its rocket vessel.
AI, and in particular generating AI, is a clear complement to automation – something that closes competitors like Teeth And Work have also adopted, like others in the world of broader automation like Uipath.
If automation and low -code approaches have erased part of the work responsible for bringing together the way different applications or services have worked together, the generative AI brings even less technicality in the mixture.
A year and a half ago, Oberhauser said: “We could see this thing from AI coming on us.” He quickly supposed that the Sweet Spot would be to work in his products, to start reducing the amount of work that developed to implement automation by transforming instructions into natural language.
“It is an prompt to create a workflow,” is the way Oberhauser describes it. “People don’t really need to write 50 lines of code to integrate the features of, let’s say, send an email.” Now, in a natural language, you can write “get information from X and send it to Y,” he said. “We see the value of changing this more easily.”
The product has been built with a mixture of LLMS in mind, and the idea is that if end users already create services using an LLM or another, it can be exchanged to work with the N8N platform. And as a number of other platforms focused on developers, N8N has a Community of contributors Who are active on platforms like Github, get involved in forums to help other developers have their questions and build and use workflow models built by others. (N8N has also predefined a number of workflow models.)
Even with all the media and hope around artificial intelligence and the Genai these days, the version supplied by the N8N AI took some time to stay, without practically no care at the start. Last year, there was a sudden tilting point.
For what? Perhaps the weight of a few trends meet. There was the bursting of chatting around the AI in coding, with companies like Poolside, Codeium and Magic, all collected a lot of money a few months from each other. And then within the end users themselves, the song to understand how to use AI has also become stronger.
But there is a lot of media threshing and also speak, and therefore ultimately the ease of use and the usefulness of N8N seems to be what sealed the agreement with users, but also investors.
“Everyone is trying to take advantage of AI but has trouble finding practical use cases,” said David Blyghton, the general partner of Highland who led his head. “The design, scale and flow of N8N are what allows people to adopt it.”
Oberhauser admits that even if “it took a while in the market to catch up”, he now says that around 75% of all N8N customers use AI tools they have built.
