The Idea
In late 2014, Jan Čurn and Jakub Balada were two Prague developers who had run out of patience with their own toolkit. They had met years earlier as IT students at Charles University, teamed up under a small consultancy called Dev tank, and taken on a client who wanted large volumes of data pulled from property websites, reliably, week after week.
Every tool they tried broke. The scrapers that demoed beautifully collapsed the moment a site added a banner. The rest treated every page as static HTML, useless against the JavaScript-heavy web the pair wrote for a living. They could write a jQuery selector to grab any element on any page. So why were they stuck with software that couldn't?
They built their own instead, on top of PhantomJS, the first headless browser on the market. It handled dynamic sites. It was simple enough for a developer to pick up in minutes. Within months they realised the thing they'd built to unblock one consulting job was worth more than the consulting.
This was the beginning of Apify.
The Execution
- Summer 2015: They applied to the first Y Combinator Fellowship with a week's notice, and Jan accidentally hit submit three days early. Out of 6,000 applications, 60 were shortlisted and 30 got in. They flew Prague to San Francisco for a 10-minute interview and made the cut.
- October 20, 2015: Apifier launched on Hacker News from a Mountain View hacker house, on a diet of Soylent and 14-hour days. The post brought 2,200 visitors and 120 signups.
- February 2016: The pair moved back to Prague, incorporated the company and raised a seed round, betting that customers needed a full-stack platform rather than a single JavaScript crawler.
- October 2017: The owner of apify.com got in touch out of the blue. They bought the domain, rebranded, and shipped Actors, serverless programs that each do one job on the web. That unit became the whole business model.
- September 2019: A secondary sale valued the company at $8.5M. Then they stopped raising altogether and ran on revenue for the next five years, while better-funded rivals piled into proxies and enterprise contracts.
- 2023: Revenue hit $7.41M on roughly $1M of profit, and Apify landed at number 187 on the FT's ranking of Europe's fastest-growing companies.
- April 2024: They took €2.8M from J&T Ventures and Reflex Capital, and said out loud that they'd kept it small on purpose so a flood of capital wouldn't wreck the culture. Total raised in nine years: about $3.5M.
- 2024: Revenue roughly doubled to $13.3M as AI companies discovered they needed live web data. Headcount went from 116 to 231.
- 2025: Apify shipped an MCP server, turning every Actor into a tool an AI agent can find and call by itself. The scraping marketplace quietly became an agent tool marketplace.
- Today: The store holds 50,000+ Actors, and Apify paid out $1.4M in a single month to around 3,000 independent developers, with the top creators clearing $10,000 MRR. Flat rental pricing is being retired on October 1, 2026 in favour of pay-per-event, built for agents that pay per action.
The lesson?
Apify raised less across a decade than most startups raise in a seed round, and used the constraint as a filter. No blitzscaling, no land grab, just a marketplace where 3,000 strangers build the inventory and Apify takes 20%. The founders didn't call the AI agent boom. They spent ten years making the web readable by machines, then the machines turned up and needed exactly that. Pick the boring layer, own it completely, and wait.