Developer tooling is changing rapidly with AI. So companies that are making it easier to adopt AI in their workflows are seeing a boom of attention. After a startup called n8n (pronounced “enay-ten”) pivoted its workflow automation platform to become more AI-friendly in 2022, it said it saw its revenues increase 5X, doubling in the last two months alone.
Now on the back of that growth, TechCrunch has confirmed that n8n has raised €55 million ($60 million) in funding on a valuation sources close to the company tell us is in the region of €250 million ($270 million).
Berlin-based n8n said it now has more than 3,000 enterprise customers and around 200,000 active users on its books. The startup will be using this Series B to continue investing in tech and to expand in newer markets like the U.S., home to more than half of n8n’s user base. The company does not disclose revenues, and that customer number includes both free and paying users, as well as those taking short-term and longer-term subscriptions.
Highland Europe is leading this latest round, with HV Capital and previous backers Sequoia, Felicis, and Harpoon also participating. Sequoia led the seed round for n8n in 2020; Felicis the Series A in 2021.
The startup, founded in 2019, picked up traction in its early years from developer teams that were looking for low-code and no-code automation solutions to make it easier to stitch applications together in ways without a lot of onerous coding.
It picked up attention for another reason, too: n8n had built a reputation by being closely tied to the concept of “fair code.”
Fair code is a progression of open source. Software developers use open source code for free, but when they want to commercialize work built on top of it, it establishes principles for compensating the open source creators or community. Jan Oberhauser, the founder and CEO of n8n, came up with the idea and runs a site dedicated to fair code.
But while n8n itself is built on fair code and leans into the open source community to grow by word of mouth — it has more than 70,000 “stars” on GitHub — the company says that it was weaving in AI that became its rocket ship.
AI, and in particular generative AI, is a clear complement to automation — something that close competitors like Tines and Workato have also embraced, as have others in the wider automation world like UiPath.
If automation and low-code approaches have erased some of the busy work of pulling together how different apps or services worked together, generative AI brings even less technicality into the mix.
A year and a half ago, Oberhauser said, “we could see this AI thing coming at us.” He quickly surmised that the sweet spot would be to work it into its products, to start to reduce the amount of work it took developers to implement automations by turning instructions into natural language.
“It’s a prompt to build workflow,” is how Oberhauser describes it. “People don’t really need to write 50 lines of code to integrate the functionality of, say, sending an email.” Now in natural language, you can write “get information from X and send it to Y,” he said. “We see the value in making changes to that more easily.”
The product was built with a blend of LLMs in mind, and the idea is that if end users are already building services using one LLM or another, it can be swapped in to work with n8n’s platform. And like a number of other developer-focused platforms, n8n has a fairly extensive contributor community that is active on platforms like GitHub, gets involved in forums to help other developers with their questions, and builds and uses workflow templates built by others (n8n also has pre-built a number of workflow templates).
Even with all the hype and hope around artificial intelligence and GenAI these days, the AI-powered version of n8n took a while to stick, with virtually no take-up at all at first. Then last year, there was a sudden a tipping point.
Why? Perhaps the weight of a couple of trends coming together. There was the burst of chatter around AI in coding, with companies like Poolside, Codeium, and Magic all raising big money within months of each other. And then within end users themselves, the chant to figure out how to use AI also became louder.
But there is a lot of hype and talk out there, too, and so ultimately n8n’s ease of use and usefulness seems to be what has sealed the deal with users, but also investors.
“Everyone is trying to leverage AI but struggling to find practical use cases,” David Blyghton, the general partner at Highland who led the round, told me over a phone call. “The design, scale, and throughput of n8n is what allows people to adopt it.”
Oberhauser admits that although “it took a while for the market to catch up,” now he says that around 75% of all of n8n’s customers are using the AI tools they have built.