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Comment by kamranjon | Hacker News Reader

I’m just wondering if anyone that is closer to this space could shed some light on if this $2.5B valuation seems more or less accurate? I have played around with n8n - I just didn’t know if it was ubiquitous/profitable. $180m round seemed pretty huge but maybe it’s really a unicorn?

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I built a GitHub-native coding / review agent that outperforms CodeRabbit (by a lot), and it only took me like two hundred hours. There are a few of us using it at work, meanwhile CodeRabbit is valued at $550M.

Do you have paying customers? Putting money into customer acquisition and retention is where a lot of money can go versus R&D.

No, I don’t. I built it inside of my employer’s walls (hedge fund), so I’d have to rebuild it from scratch in order to acquire paying customers (not a bad idea).

True, from scratch, may need to be cautious regarding re-creating it having built it on your employer's time and machinery/property, check your employment contract. Still very cool that you built this!

> Founded in 2019, n8n helps companies automate repetitive computing tasks. As of March, it had more than 230,000 active users and reported annual recurring revenue of over $40 million. The focus for the fresh funding will be on expanding its engineering capabilities and hiring.

$40M rev makes this a 62.5x rev multiple. AI has been around 40x lately so it’s a bit high but it sounds like there was competition to lead and those are March numbers so it’s probably about on par.

Personally I find these multiples absurd but big VC needs to put money somewhere and AI is the new SaaS so here we are.

> The Series C comes less than a year after a $60 million Series B, which valued the German group at a reported $350 million.

That’s a huge step up so maybe their growth numbers are that good.

https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/ai-agent-startup-n8n-lan...

There is no accurate valuation in this space.

They seem to be pushing their message now as an easy way to integrate AI to workflows.

$180m seeds make sense if you remember to say AI lots. See Thinking Machines for example.

Add a sprinkle of "quantum" in to get an extra 100M, too. I am profoundly disgusted by the phrase "quantum ML". That's not a thing one can vaguely point to (or its just not a thing period), and of course they never define it.

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