[Funding alert] Prague startup Apify Secures €2.8Million in Funding

An open market featuring so-called Actors—cloud-based applications that are simple to operate, share, integrate, and expand upon—is another of the company's primary offerings. Of these, Apify has approximately 1,500 Actors available. Siemens, Intercom, Microsoft, T-Mobile, and Accenture are some of its current clientele.

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Established in 2015 in Mountain View, California, through the Y Combinator Fellowship. In 2023, the firm from Prague made a profit of about €1 million on sales of €6.7 million. In addition, its revenue for the last quarter of 2023 increased by 80% over the same period the previous year.

Jan Čurn, founder and CEO of Apify: “Our last investment was secured in 2019, and Apify has been growing solely from its own profits in recent years. However, we now see an opportunity in the market to accelerate growth, which is why we have decided to seek further investment. Given our size, we opted for a relatively modest amount, as we didn't want to disrupt the company with a massive influx of capital. This allows us to maintain our financial efficiency and unique company culture while keeping our options open for future investments or exits. Our current goal is to demonstrate our ability to convert capital into economically efficient growth, attract new customers, and scale our business. Once we achieve this, it may make sense for us to seek a significant investment from global VC funds and attempt to become the next Czech unicorn.”

Among the investors are J&T Ventures, a venture capital firm, and Reflex Capital, an existing investor.

Martin Kešner from J&T Ventures shared: “We have been following the journey of Apify with enthusiasm since 2016 when we first met Honza and Jakub. In that time, they have built cutting-edge technology, a strong brand and an international network of customers. As a result, they are now in a great position to take advantage of the huge opportunities that are opening up. We believe we can help them grow into a global leader.”

The main focus of Apify will be on product development, marketing, and encouraging the expansion of the developer community. The business also boosted the ESOP pool for employee incentives to a share of roughly 15% as part of the funding round.

About Apify

In 2015, Jan Čurn and Jakub Balada founded Apify out of the Mountain View, California-based Y Combinator Fellowship. The original plan was to use the then-new headless browser technology to make it simple for developers to create adaptable and scalable web crawlers using only front-end JavaScript.