Apify is a full-stack web scraping and data extraction platform founded in 2015 in Prague by Jan Curn (CEO) and Jakub Balada, both Y Combinator alumni. The company built an early reputation as a profitable, largely bootstrapped business before taking institutional capital, and is widely used by developers and enterprises that need real-time web data for AI applications, agents, and analytics.
The platform is built around 'Actors' — serverless cloud programs that scrape, automate, or integrate with websites and APIs. Apify Store hosts a large catalogue of pre-built Actors covering social media (Instagram, TikTok, X, LinkedIn), search engines (Google, Bing), ecommerce (Amazon, Shopify), maps, and general-purpose website crawling. Developers can also build, monetize, and publish their own Actors in the store.
Apify raised €2.8M (approximately $3M) in April 2024 from J&T Ventures with participation from existing investor Reflex Capital, focused on marketing, product, and developer community growth. The user's brief described a $10M Series A from Andreessen Horowitz in 2024; public sources do not corroborate that specific round and instead confirm the J&T-led €2.8M round. CEO Jan Curn was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year for Prague in 2024.
Apify positions itself as infrastructure for AI applications and agents that need fresh web data, with first-class support for LLM ingestion, RAG pipelines, and agent frameworks. Reported metrics include $13.3M in revenue with a ~116-person team. The product competes with Bright Data, Oxylabs, ScraperAPI, Zyte, and Firecrawl, differentiating on the open Actor ecosystem and developer experience.
Buyers should evaluate Apify based on the legality and ToS of target websites, proxy and anti-bot capabilities, and pricing at scale. Strengths include the breadth of pre-built Actors and the developer ecosystem; trade-offs include scraping's inherent legal grey zones and pricing complexity for high-volume use cases.