Fair-code pioneer n8n raises $60M for AI-powered workflow automation

Developer tooling changes quickly with AI. So companies that make it easier to use AI in their workflows, see a flourishing of attention. After a startup called N8N (pronounced as “Enay-Teen”) has turned its workflow automation platform to become more-friendly in 2022, it said that it saw the income increase by 5x, in the past two months alone.

Now, on the back of that growth, TechCrunch has confirmed that N8N has raised € 55 million ($ 60 million) in financing on a valuation sources close to the company, we tell us that it is in the region of € 250 million ($ 270 million).

N8N, based in Berlin, said it now has more than 3,000 Enterprise customers and around 200,000 active users in his books. The startup will use this series B to continue to invest in technology and to expand in newer markets such as the US, the home base of more than half of the N8N user file. The company does not reveal income and that customer number includes both free and paying users, as well as those who are used in the short and longer term subscriptions.

Highland Europe leads this final round, with HV Capital and earlier Backers Sequoia, Felicis and Harpoon, also participate. Sequoia led the seed round for N8N in 2020; Felicis de Serie A in 2021.

The startup, founded in 2019, picked up traction in the early years of developer teams who were looking for solutions with low code and no-code automation to make it easier to sail together in ways without much heavy coding.

It also attracted attention for another reason: N8N had built up a reputation by being closely connected to the concept of ‘fair code. ”

Fair code is a progress of open source. Software developers use free open source code, but when they want to commercialize the work that is built on top, this establishes principles to compensate for the open source makers or community. Jan Oberhauser, the founder and CEO of N8N, came up with the idea and runs one site dedicated to fair code.

But while N8N itself is built on honest code and leans in the open source community to grow with mouth -to -mouth advertising -it has more than 70,000 “stars” on GitHub -the company says it was woven in AI that his rocket ship became.

AI, and in particular generative AI, is a clear addition to automation – something that competitors close Tine And Workato have also embraced, just like others in the wider automation world such as Uipath.

If automation and low-code approaches have erased part of the busy work to bring together how different apps or services worked, generative AI brings even less technical technical details to the mix.

A year and a half ago, Oberhauser said: “We could see this AI -thing coming to us.” He quickly suspected that the sweet spot would be to work in its products, to reduce the amount of work that developers were needed to implement automation by changing instructions in natural language.

“It is a prompt to build workflow,” is how Oberhauser describes it. “People don’t really have to write 50 lines of code to integrate the functionality of, for example, sending an e -mail.” Now in natural language, you can “get information from X and send it to Y,” he said. “We see the value to make changes more easily there.”

The product is built with a mix of LLMS in mind, and the idea is that if end users are already building services with some LLM, it can be exchanged to work with the N8N platform. And just like a number of other platforms focused on developers, N8N has a fairly comprehensive employee community This is active on platforms such as Github, is involved in forums to help other developers with their questions and builds and uses workflows templates built by others (N8N has also built a number of workflow templates in advance).

Even with all the hype and hope about artificial intelligence and genai nowadays, the AI-driven version of N8n lasted a while to linger, with almost no take-up at all. Last year there was a sudden tipping point.

Why? Maybe the weight of a few trends comes together. There was the eruption of chattering around AI in coding, with companies such as Polside, Codeium and Magic that all collected a lot of money within months in succession. And then within end users themselves, it became singing to find out how AI also used became louder.

But there is also a lot of hype and talk there, and so ultimately the ease of use and usability of N8N seems to be what the deal has closed with users, but also investors.

“Everyone tries to use AI, but is struggling to find practical use cases,” said David Blyghton, the general partner at Highland who led the round, a phone call by telephone. “The design, the scale and the transit of N8N is what makes people able to accept it.”

Oberhauser admits that although “it took a while before the market catches up”, now he says that about 75% of all N8N customers use the AI ​​tools that they have built.