Czech data startup Apify secures a €2.8M investment round

Prague-based web data extraction platform Apify has secured €2.8 million in a funding round backed by J&T Ventures, with participation from the existing investor Reflex Capital. The new funding will be used in marketing activities, product development, and further growth of its platform, The Recursive reports.

• Founded in 2015 by Jan Čurn and Jakub Balada from the Y Combinator Fellowship in Mountain View, California, Apify provides a web scraping platform, allowing companies to gather data from websites. It aims to automate any web-based workflow, and then execute it at scale in the cloud.

• Apify clients include Siemens, Intercom, Microsoft, T-Mobile, and Accenture. The startup claims that its revenue increased an 80% for the last quarter of 2023 compared to the year prior. Apify’s previous investment injection was in 2019.

This investment allows us to maintain our financial efficiency and unique company culture while keeping our options open for future investments or exits. Our current goal is to demonstrate our ability to convert capital into economically efficient growth, attract new customers, and scale our business. Once we achieve this, it may make sense for us to seek a large investment from global VC funds and attempt to become the next Czech unicorn,

Jan Čurn, co-founder and CEO of Apify, comments.

• The fresh investment was led by J&T Ventures, an early-stage Prague based venture capital fund, which invests into startups from the CEE and SEE region. Its strategy is industry agnostic, but the firm primarily focuses on companies in seed stage. J&T Ventures’ average ticket size is between €500,000 – €2.5 million.
• The existing investor, Czech VC firm Reflex Capital, which is managed by Ondřej Fryc, also participated in the financing.

Apify will spend the fresh capital on increasing its marketing activities, product development, and will further foster the growth of the developer community.