API Hero Ltd
Trigger.dev's mission is to give every developer the power to easily build production-grade AI agents and workflows, so they can focus on inventing the next generation of software. The platform handles reliability, queues, scaling, task orchestration, human-in-the-loop, and observability for developers.
Founding Story
Modern web frameworks like Next.js made building complex web apps far easier, but creating background jobs still required experienced developers, a lot of time, and separate heavy infrastructure. Matt Aitken, Eric Allam, James Ritchie, and Daniel Patel identified this opportunity and built Trigger.dev to make background jobs easy to create without infrastructure. Initially positioned as an 'open source Zapier alternative' at their Hacker News launch in February 2023, their true vision was to become the background jobs framework for the modern developer. The company participated in Y Combinator's W23 batch, originally under the name 'API Hero' before pivoting to focus on background jobs and workflow automation.
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Leadership
Founders
Matt Aitken
CEO and co-founder of Trigger.dev. Previously Chief Technology Officer at SOLVE. Won 2 Apple App of the Year awards. Programmer and creator of jsonhero.io.
Eric Allam
Founder and CTO of Trigger.dev. Previously co-founded CodeSchool.com. Creator of jsonhero.io.
James Ritchie
Co-founder and frontend engineer of Trigger.dev. Product lead experience. Creator of JSON Hero.
Daniel Patel
Co-founder of Trigger.dev.
Executive Team
Matt Aitken
CEO and Co-founder
Previously CTO at SOLVE. Won 2 Apple App of the Year awards. Creator of jsonhero.io.
Eric Allam
CTO and Co-founder
Previously co-founded CodeSchool.com. Creator of jsonhero.io.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Subscription-based SaaS model with usage-based pricing. Revenue from API usage, compute time (charged per second based on machine specs), and monthly subscriptions. Cloud hosting with pay-per-use model where customers only pay when code is executing. Additional charges for team seats, preview branches, and schedules beyond included amounts.
Pricing Tiers
$5 free monthly usage, 20 concurrent runs, unlimited tasks, 5 team members, Dev and Prod environments, preview branches, 10 schedules, 1 day log retention, community support, 1 alert destination, 10 concurrent Realtime connections
$10 monthly usage included, 50 concurrent runs, unlimited tasks, 5 team members, Dev, Staging and Prod environments, 5 preview branches, 100 schedules, 7 day log retention, community support, 3 alert destinations, 50 concurrent Realtime connections
$50 monthly usage included, 200+ concurrent runs (then $10/month per 50), unlimited tasks, 25+ team members (then $20/month per seat), Dev, Staging and Prod environments, 20+ preview branches (then $10/month per branch), 1000+ schedules (then $10/month per 1,000), 30 day log retention, dedicated Slack support, 100+ alert destinations, 500+ concurrent Realtime connections (then $10/month per 100)
All Pro plan features plus custom log retention, priority support, role-based access control, SOC 2 report, SSO
Target Markets
- AI/ML developers building agents and workflows
- SaaS companies needing background job processing
- EdTech platforms
- Marketing technology companies
- E-commerce platforms
- Government contractors
- Building and deploying AI agents
- Long-running AI tasks
- Complex background jobs
- AI-powered pricing intelligence
- Government procurement automation
- Logistics AI copilots
- MagicSchool
- Icon.com
- DavidAI
- Tierly
History & Milestones
Launched Trigger.dev v4 GA during Launch Week 2
Raised $16M Series A led by Standard Capital
Trigger.dev v2 reached end-of-life
Reached 13.5k GitHub stars
Platform executes hundreds of millions of agents each month for over 30,000 developers
1 AI Tool by API Hero Ltd
Trigger.dev
2moOpen source background jobs framework for building AI workflows, agents, and long-running tasks in TypeScript with retries, queues, and observability.
