Honza and Jakub are university friends who founded a turnkey software development company after finishing school. One day, they needed a crawler to download data from the web for a client, but they couldn’t find one that had all the required functions. So, they decided to create their own tool, which proved to be very popular. A few months later they applied to join the prestigious Y Combinator Fellowship accelerator and their project was selected along with 32 others out of 6,500 entries. The first version of the service was launched online in October 2015 from Mountain View, California under the moniker Apifier.
“We live in a world where firms, big and small, will have to learn to use data in their business if they want to succeed. The largest open database in the world is the Internet. The problem is the web was mostly built for people, so computers often have a problem meaningfully using data from the internet. Our mission at Apify is to create the best tool in the world for the extraction and processing of structured data from websites and to use that information to help firms from various sectors succeed in the 21st century.”
Apify: www.apify.com
