n8n's Series B is funding, not a $2.5B catalog valuation

The story

On 25 March 2025, Jan Oberhauser used the n8n blog to announce a €55 million Series B led by Highland Europe, with HV Capital and earlier investors Sequoia, Felicis, and Harpoon. The post is at https://blog.n8n.io/series-b/. Six years after he started building, he wrote, more than 200,000 people worldwide were using n8n, and more than 3,000 enterprises. The GitHub repository, he said, ranked among the top 150 projects of all time. €55 million is capital raised. Two hundred thousand people are not the same as 3,000 enterprises. Neither figure is annual recurring revenue, and he did not publish a valuation in that post.

He dated the product to a personal bottleneck. Workflow tools he tried were either inflexible or demanded deep expertise, so he built something meant to be powerful for developers and learnable for everyone else. A screenshot caption in the Series B essay places n8n in September 2018, still pre-release. Early days meant coding late and wondering whether anyone would want it. Then people shared workflows and templates. Government agencies and security teams, he wrote, were among those who trusted the tool. Vodafone and Delivery Hero appear as named companies transforming operations. Named logos are usage color, not disclosed contract values, and they are not the 200,000-person figure.

The origin clock is more precise in the second-anniversary post of 23 June 2021, at https://blog.n8n.io/celebrating-n8n-second-anniversary/. Two years earlier to the day, he had created the GitHub repository. Small automations, he wrote, ate half a day or a day once you counted documentation, code, deploy, SSL, and crash recovery. Existing open-source tools were not enough, so he built his own as a side project beside another startup and a part-time job that financed the work. In June 2019 he published the first version and shared it on AlternativeTo and Quora. People filed issues, opened pull requests, and emailed. That is contribution, not a billable seat.

Stars arrived faster than a company. The repository gathered 5,000 stars five months after publishing and 10,000 by November 2019. Those are GitHub stars, founder-reported, not users and not enterprises. In October 2019 he took n8n to Product Hunt and Hacker News. From there, he wrote, it took off, and he started hiring. One of the most active contributors, Ricardo, became an employee. By November 2020, 100 people had contributed to the repository. A hundred contributors is not a hundred customers.

Funding in this period is two named rounds, both his. In March 2020 n8n raised $1.5 million seed to build the team. First teammates joined in April 2020, remote or in Berlin. In April 2021 he announced $12 million Series A led by Felicis, bringing total funding to nearly $14 million. The Series A post, https://blog.n8n.io/series-a-announcement/, is dated 26 April 2021. Seed and Series A are cash in. They are not the later euro Series B, and they are not revenue.

By Series A he also published operating snapshots that should stay in their columns. Since seed, the team had launched n8n.cloud, added 130-plus integrations, and formed a community of more than 16,000 enthusiasts. One year earlier they had been four people in a new Berlin office; on announcement day the team had 16 members. The GitHub repository had over 13,000 stargazers. Employees received $100 a month to donate to open-source projects they cared about. Community size, headcount, and stars are still not ARR.

License was the business-model fight. In a December 2021 fair-code essay he wrote that he had worked on n8n part-time for about 1.5 years, with another startup and a job, until he needed a path to full-time work. Straight open source, he feared, would let a hoster outrun him while he supported their users for free. Open-core felt like making the product worse on purpose. He shipped Apache 2 with Commons Clause, called the project "open-source" in quotation marks, and then absorbed a Hacker News and GitHub pile-on, including an issue he said collected more than 330 comments. Hacker News changed a title from an open-source Zapier alternative to a workflow alternative, which he thought sounded like closed SaaS. He and Kenneth Malac later defined fair-code: source available, generally free to use, commercially restricted by the authors. n8n, he wrote, became the first official fair-code project.

Product milestones in the anniversary post are counts of nodes and releases, not money. They had created 200 nodes by the end of October, then offered 270-plus integrations. On 30 December 2020 they cut the 100th release, then shipped weekly. January 2021 brought n8n.cloud. n8n.embed followed for teams that wanted the editor inside their own software. Monthly community meetups started in May 2021. He said they were aiming at version 1.0 and user management. Technical inventory is not a revenue statement.

The 2025 Series B letter turns from nodes to AI. Automation, Oberhauser wrote, is not only connecting systems; with models in the canvas, users can analyze data that used to be too messy and let workflows take decisions that used to need a person. The winning recipe, he said, is AI, code, and humans. He pointed readers to Ingrid Lunden's TechCrunch write-up and to Highland Europe's own note, then brought the argument back to community meetups, including one in Paris in December 2024. Proceeds would expand the team, fund education for beginners and power users, and support people turning n8n expertise into agencies. He closed by calling €55 million fuel, not a destination. Catalog copy that later stamps a $2.5 billion valuation or a $40 million yearly run-rate onto this letter is not in the founder posts fetched here.

His own timeline is side project, stars, seed, cloud, Series A, fair-code, then a euro Series B with a 200,000-person and 3,000-enterprise snapshot. Keep waitlist-style community counts, GitHub stars, enterprise logos, dollar seed, dollar Series A, and euro Series B in separate cells. He did not give ARR in these posts. The record should not invent one.