Apify
Apify is building the world's leading platform for developing and running web data and automation solutions. They help people get more value from the web, letting them automate mundane tasks and spend their time on things that matter.
Founding Story
Jan Čurn and Jakub Balada met while studying computer science at Charles University in Prague. They initially formed Dev tank, a consulting company, but grew dissatisfied with selling their time. In 2014-2015, while working on a client project that required extracting data from real estate websites, they realized existing web scraping tools couldn't handle the dynamic, JavaScript-driven modern web. They decided to build their own tool using PhantomJS, the first headless browser. On October 20, 2015, they launched Apifier (later renamed Apify) on Hacker News from a hacker house. They were accepted into the inaugural Y Combinator Fellowship (YC F1) program in 2015, which provided $12,000 and mentorship. The company moved to Mountain View, California for the program, then returned to Prague in 2016 where they raised seed funding and began building the full-stack platform.
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Leadership
Founders
Jan Čurn
Co-founder and CEO. Met Jakub Balada while studying computer science at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University in Prague. Previously worked on a school project called 'najednommiste.cz' (a semantic web analyzer for used car listings), which later inspired Apify. Co-founded Dev tank, a consulting company, before launching Apify. Participated in Y Combinator Fellowship (YC F1) in 2015.
Jakub Balada
Co-founder. Met Jan Čurn while studying computer science at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University in Prague. Co-founded Dev tank, a consulting company with Jan before launching Apify. Participated in Y Combinator Fellowship (YC F1) in 2015. Previously worked as a consultant before deciding to build a product-based company.
Executive Team
Jan Čurn
Founder & CEO
Co-founder with software development background, studied computer science at Charles University Prague
Jakub Balada
Co-founder
Co-founder with software development background, studied computer science at Charles University Prague
Business Model
Revenue Model
API usage and subscriptions. The company operates on a pay-as-you-go model with monthly subscription tiers. Revenue also comes from the Apify Store marketplace where developers build and monetize tools (company pays developers a share of revenue, e.g., $500K+ per month as of Nov 2025). Pricing is based on compute units plus add-ons for concurrent runs, Actor RAM, proxy services, and support.
Pricing Tiers
$5 to spend in Apify Store or on your own Actors, $0.3 per compute unit, community support, no Apify Store discount
$29 to spend in Apify Store or on your own Actors, $0.3 per compute unit, chat support, Bronze Apify Store discount
$199 to spend in Apify Store or on your own Actors, $0.25 per compute unit, priority chat support, Silver Apify Store discount
$999 to spend in Apify Store or on your own Actors, $0.2 per compute unit, account manager, Gold Apify Store discount
Custom scraping solutions, scalable pricing, SLAs with guaranteed data, dedicated team of experts
6-month program for developers building their own Actors and AI agents with $500 worth of free usage plus other benefits
Target Markets
- AI and machine learning companies
- LLM application developers
- Enterprise companies
- Software developers
- Data scientists
- Marketing agencies
- AI training data collection
- LLM application data feeding
- Vector database population
- RAG pipeline integration
- Social media monitoring and analytics
- Competitive intelligence
- Siemens
- Intercom
- Microsoft
- Groupon
History & Milestones
Celebrated 10-year anniversary
Launched the Apify $1M Challenge with $1 million prize pool for developers
Closed €2.8M funding round from J&T Ventures and Reflex Capital
Launched Crawlee for Python, expanding the open-source library to Python developers
Achieved €6.7 million in revenue with almost €1 million profit; 80% revenue growth in Q4 2023 compared to prior year
