Weekly AI Recap: From a Consulting Project to a Web Scraping Platform With $8M in ARR

Welcome to Homebase Edition #4 - A weekly newsletter bringing you stories & insights from scrappy teams and solo founders building the AI unicorns of tomorrow

What’s on tap today:

• Weekly Founder Story
• Weekly AI Headline Recap
• Emerging AI Trend

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AI FOUNDER SPOTLIGHT

1 Founder story
From Command-Line to Cloud Nine

Finding opportunity in complex challenges - that's the heart of entrepreneurship!

Take Jan Curn and Jakub Balada, for example.

In 2014, they faced a daunting task: scraping vast amounts of web data efficiently for a consulting project.

Their solution, Apify, has since evolved into a web scraping platform generating $8M in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).

With an additional $3.5 million in fresh funding, Apify is now poised to simplify the messy world of web scraping for developers worldwide.


They've achieved:

🕸️ Over 1,000 pre-built tools to scrape any site, no coding required
👩‍💻 Crawlee: the #1 JavaScript web crawler with 12k GitHub stars
💸 $8M+ in annual recurring revenue from strategic bootstrapping - this places them at a 100M or so valuation company

It all started with a simple command-line tool for extracting structured site data.

But Curn and Balada had bigger dreams - turning it into an all-in-one, cloud-based scraping paradise. 


Let's dive deeper:

🌐 Saw a gap: existing scrapers were wonky and inflexible
🚀 Spearheaded smarter, smoother scraping automation.
☁️ Evolved their tool into an all-in-one cloud platform.
💥 Drew in users through savvy launches and SEO mastery
🐳 Released open-source projects to foster a loyal dev community
💎 Kept laser-focus on the developer audience despite shitshow challenges


Key Highlights:

• Built a solution they personally needed as web developers
• Prioritized simplicity by providing essential tools out-of-the-box
• Embraced open-source to engage the dev community
• Survived startup "shitshows" by disciplined prioritization
• Sustainable growth through bootstrapping and organic traction
• Final piece: strategic funding for aggressive expansion

Read more about their journey here 🔥🔥🔥

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HEADLINE ROUNDUP

Headline recap

• OpenAI launches ChatGPT-4o: the omni-modal AI that talks, sees, and mimics human interaction. (OAI)
• Google's major developer conference, #GoogleIO, starts today at 1 pm EST - big AI announcements anticipated! (G)
• OpenAI Startup Fund raises an additional $5M. (TC)
• NYT's OpenAI lawsuit costs hit $1M so far. (NYT)
• Soundhound and Perplexity bring AI web search to voice assistants. (SAI)
• Oklo, a nuclear power startup chaired by Sam Altman, goes public to fuel AI data centers. (CNBC)
• SoftBank invests $5 billion in AI despite three years of losses. (WSJ)
• Reddit updates policy to protect user privacy from AI data use. (B)
• MIT study reveals AI's deceptive behaviors, including lying and bluffing, raising societal concerns. (CP)
• Apple plans Siri revamp to incorporate generative AI, catching up with chatbot competitors. (NYT)

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TRENDS

1 AI Trend of the week

Here's an emerging trend I've got my eye on:

1/ Lavender Ai 4.4K Volume / +1011%Growth

This tool, known as Lavender AI, is designed to assist sellers globally in crafting superior emails swiftly and receiving more positive responses in a shorter time frame. It leverages artificial intelligence to analyze and improve email content, thereby enhancing communication efficiency and effectiveness.