The idea for n8n came from entrepreneur Jan Oberhauser, who spent the early part of his career in visual effects and digital media, working as a pipeline technical director and compositor at Digital Domain, Pixomondo, and Neon VFX. 

Oberhauser saw the same problem everywhere: artists had to jump between tools, data was siloed and the only way to connect various systems and data sources together was to hire expensive engineers.

He went on to build showreel.tv, a platform for visual artists to share their work, and later founded link.fish, a web indexing and data integration company. These ventures laid the groundwork for n8n, which Oberhauser founded in 2019.

“N8n was always known as the company doing workflow automation. The company built up a strong community among developers and startups and a strong product that was highly customisable,” says Jannis.

N8n has multiple thousands of nodes, a building block of a workflow. That means customers can plug together systems like their HR, sales, or marketing software with Claude or ChatGPT and an external database, able to adapt the workflows as they go.

“That customisability gave them the edge when generative AI came around the corner. The team was able to move fast to be the one product that could help companies implement AI into workflows to the best extent possible.”

n8n has three major advantages over its competitors. It's fair-code, meaning developers and businesses can tweak the code to suit their individual needs. It can be self-hosted, letting users run the software on their own infrastructure. And it's built for production at scale, with the observability, governance and security controls teams need to deploy AI agents reliably.

Crucially, n8n’s interface allows users to see how data flows between tools and to set guardrails around how AI is used — which will only become more important as systems become more agentic. 

“In a fully autonomous agent system, you lose that visibility — you don’t know where the data is coming from, and you can’t easily enforce guardrails.” says Jannis. 

Granting users an extra layer of transparency and trust was important to Oberhauser who, according to Jannis, always has the best interests of his customers at heart. 

“In every interaction I’ve had with Jan, he’s always optimised for the n8n community — not for an investor’s good or his personal good. I think that makes him very special.”

Looking ahead, the startup plans to expand its enterprise customer base and secure further Big Tech partnerships.

“Winning the enterprise segment for workflow, orchestration, automation with AI is, I think, the key piece here,” says Jannis. “This can come from n8n’s fair code code-to-market motion, but also from a go-to-market motion through the consultancies of the world.”