Jan Oberhauser was a VFX pipeline technical director at Academy Award-winning studios, working on films like Disney's Maleficent and Happy Feet Two. His job: automating complex visual effects pipelines. He started coding n8n in early 2018 in his Berlin apartment after work hours — a workflow automation tool that would let anyone connect apps and APIs visually.

The Open Source Launch

On June 23, 2019, Jan published n8n to GitHub. He launched "properly" in October 2019. Within 5 months, the repo had 10,000 stars. The key differentiator from Zapier: n8n was fully open-source and self-hostable, giving users control over their data and workflows.

Community First

Jan's first hire wasn't an engineer — it was a developer evangelist. This revealed his conviction that community would be the competitive moat. He used "fair-code" licensing (source-visible but commercial use requires a partnership), letting developers try everything before paying. An active community forum and Discord grew to 16,000+ members by 2021.

From VFX to $2.5B

Sequoia Capital co-led a $1.5M seed round in March 2020. By 2025, n8n had raised $253M across 4 rounds, reached $40M ARR with just 67 employees ($597K revenue per employee), and earned a $2.5B valuation. The AI wave supercharged growth — n8n became the go-to platform for building AI agent workflows.

• Solo founder side project (2018)
• GitHub stars: 150,000+
• Seed round: $1.5M (Sequoia, March 2020)
• $40M ARR with 67 employees
• Revenue per employee: $597K
• Valuation: $2.5B (October 2025)