Apify is a full-stack web scraping and automation 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 Actor marketplace
The platform is built around Actors — serverless cloud programs that scrape, automate, or integrate with websites and APIs. Apify positions itself as the largest marketplace of tools for AI, with thousands of Actors available to automate business workflows: pulling real-time web data, tracking competitors, generating leads, monitoring social media, and connecting apps and agents to live sources. The marketplace covers popular sites including Google Maps, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, and LinkedIn, alongside search engines and ecommerce platforms. Developers can also build, publish, and monetize their own Actors in the store.
What comes built in
Proxies, headless browsers, anti-blocking, storage, and scheduling are all included in the platform rather than assembled separately. For general-purpose crawling, Website Content Crawler handles any URL; for specific sites, the marketplace usually has a tested Actor ready to run. Apify also ships JavaScript and Python SDKs, a documented REST API, and webhooks for run events.
AI agent access
Any Actor can be used as an MCP tool via mcp.apify.com, letting LLMs and AI agents call live web data through the Model Context Protocol rather than a bespoke integration. Combined with first-class support for LLM ingestion and RAG pipelines, this positions Apify as infrastructure for agents that need fresh data from the open web.
Company and funding
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. CEO Jan Curn was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year for Prague in 2024. Reported figures put revenue around $13.3M with a team of roughly 116 people.
Evaluating it
Apify competes with Bright Data, Oxylabs, ScraperAPI, Zyte, and Firecrawl, differentiating on the open Actor ecosystem and developer experience. Buyers should evaluate it against the legality and terms of service 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.