His name is N8N, he is German and has converted the automation of workflows into something sexy

For many years Jan Oberhauser worked for special effects (VFX) companies in the film and television industry. In those works he realized that automating certain tasks allowed simplifying his work and that of his colleagues in a remarkable way, and that was when he decided to take a complete turn to his career: he created an automation startup he called which he called N8N and has ended up becoming the last and promising European unicorn. There is nothing.

Thus N8N was born. The company founded by Oberhauser He was born in 2019 In Berlin, Germany. Its objective: create a workflow automation platform that stood out for being Open Source – they prefer to use the term “Fair Code“,” Fair code ” -. In addition, you could and can be used in both autohosped mode (anyone can be mounted on its PC/server) and directly through its” key in hand “systems with the traditional SAAS scheme and its Subscription plans. The code is available In Github.

What does this platform do. Basically, Automize everything. For this, it makes use of integrations of all kinds in third -party web applications and services, but also internally developed tools and, for some time, AI models that have become one of the star ingredients of those automation. The possibilities are practically unlimited, but to give some examples, N8N allows:

• That upon receiving an email in Gmail the sender leakes, the attachments are saved in Google Drive and you will notify you in Slack
• That if any event occurs in an app or service, you are sent an alert in slack, whatsapp or discord
• Download SDE files a FTP server, convert them to another format, process them and then distribute them by messaging channels

A big ifttt. In essence N8N is something like a IFTTT Supervitaminazo: It is possible to chain all kinds of tasks so that “if this happens, you do this another.” However, the goal is to capture not only to end users – in Reddit There is a community Very nourished and enthusiastic of them – but to business users, for whom it raises a clear alternative to very popular automation platforms such as Zapier either Make (In both cases, no autohosped solution). Something that seems boring and cumbersome apparently becomes something fun, almost sexy – as they demonstrate Some YouTube video tutorials-, with N8N.

N8N has not stopped growing. In 2020, a few months after being created, he already captured a small investment round of 1.5 million dollars. A year later They raised 12 million dollars more in a new round, and since then they have not stopped growing, but their true explosion has taken advantage of the boom of generative AI.

A German Unicorn. Four months ago and after a new financing round of 55 million euros, N8N had a notable assessment of 350 million dollars. But as they indicate In Bloombergthis assessment could now be triggered to the 2.3 billion dollars thanks to a recent additional round in which the Risk Capital firm will lead with an important participation not yet defined.N The French Mistral either The Spanish Freepik.

AI agents as a key ingredient. The company already exceeds 40 million dollars of recurrent income (subscriptions), and has benefited from the aforementioned AI and the phenomenon of the AI agentswith the difference that here these agents are really One more piece of those flows Automation. When you define one of those flows, they can “call” any model of AI to perform any task, and from it, that the exit ends up being the entrance of a new stage of the workflow. The power of the system, which was already remarkable, is now multiplied with the help of that option.

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