In March 2023, we founded Dify.
At that moment, large language models had just crossed a technological inflection point. One thing was clear to me: this technology would fundamentally reshape the world. Not as an incremental improvement, but as a structural transformation. How every team works, how every organization operates would be redefined.
I asked myself: if this is where things are heading, what can we build?
The answer: put this technology in everyone's hands, not just the most well-resourced corporations, not just the most elite engineering teams, but everyone with an idea, with domain expertise, with real problems to solve.
That has been Dify's mission since day one.
Today, I'm grateful to announce: Dify has raised a $30M Series Pre-A round led by HSG, with participation from GL Ventures, Alt-Alpha Capital, a new spin-out from Bessemer Venture Partners, 5Y Capital, Mizuho Leaguer Investment and NYX Ventures. 5Y Capital, a returning investor, chose to double down in this round. That means a great deal to us.
The shift
When we started building, the term "agentic workflows" didn't exist yet. The dominant interface for AI was still a chat box. Useful, but limited.
Real work doesn’t happen in a chat box. It happens across systems, across documents, inside processes that repeat every day. It has inputs, approvals, accountability and edge cases. For AI to truly matter to a team, it had to show up in the places where work actually happens.
That is why Dify exists.
When ARPANET first transmitted data in 1969, no one knew it would become the internet. The impact of a general-purpose technology often only becomes apparent after it is truly embedded in everyday work. AI is at that inflection point now.
Two and a half years later, the numbers speak for themselves. Dify has become the 51st most-starred open source project on GitHub. It runs on more than 1.4 million machines worldwide, serving developers and teams across over 175 countries and regions. Over 2,000 teams and 280 enterprises have made a fundamental shift on Dify: from solution adopters to solution builders.
What Dify is
Dify is an open-source platform that helps teams build, deploy, and operate agentic workflows, with a visual builder and production-grade infrastructure.
It sits between your models and your business systems. It's for teams that want to move beyond prototypes but don't want to reinvent the full stack every time. Two things have stayed constant: Reliability and Simplicity. Reliable enough to hold up under real load and simple enough that anyone with domain expertise can build with it directly, without learning a new discipline first.
Organizations use Dify to run real work: document review pipelines, internal copilots grounded in enterprise knowledge, customer support automation with escalation paths, and operational workflows like invoice auditing and correspondence drafting.
"Dify gave us a practical way to move beyond prototypes and actually operationalize AI workflows. We were able to turn real business processes into maintainable systems, without rebuilding infrastructure every time." — Mark Sear Director of AI Solutions Engineering at Maersk |
"Dify's intuitive interface allows our teams to rapidly design and deploy complex natural language processing pipelines, enabling us to improve the quality of our assessment products while reducing cost and time to market." — Gary Feng Director of AI at ETS |
A bold vision
The agentic workflows we have today are the starting point of this vision, not the destination.
The future of how organizations work will be fully customizable. Every team will build its own agents, design its own workflows, and build the interfaces for people to use them. These two things, building the system and building the experience, will be one and the same.
What Dify provides today is the logic layer of that operating system. There's a great deal of work ahead. But we know the direction:
Many People. Many Agents. One Simple Way to Work.
Our team knows how to build for developers. But this time, our ambition is larger: to bring this technology to everyone, faster than ever before.
Developers are the starting point. Ultimately, everyone with a real problem to solve should be able to use it.
What this funding enables
This investment accelerates our work in four key areas:
Production-ready agents and workflows. Better building blocks, clearer debugging, and more predictable behavior under real load. We're focused on making agentic systems something you can actually rely on.
Enterprise foundations. Performance, compliance, permissions, auditability — the operational controls that larger teams need to adopt new tools with confidence.
Lowering the barrier to building. If you have domain expertise, you should be able to build something useful directly. We’ll keep pushing to make Dify accessible to more people, not just developers.
A healthier open-source ecosystem. More templates, better plugins and connectors, and clearer contribution paths. The community has shaped this platform from day one, and we intend to keep it that way.
Come build this bridge
We are, ourselves, an AI-native organization. Dify’s offices today span the San Francisco Bay Area, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Suzhou. We live inside the future we're building.
We’re growing the team and looking for people who want to help us build this bridge. If you believe this is happening too, we should talk.Most people spend their careers waiting. Waiting for the right project, the right stage, the right moment when their work finally reaches someone.
Most people spend their careers waiting. Waiting for the right project, the right stage, the right moment when their work finally reaches someone.
Here, that moment happens every week. The code you write runs on over a million machines. A decision you make on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon will change how developers in 175 countries build AI applications.
That kind of impact doesn’t take years to accumulate. From day one, it’s already there.
View our open roles or reach out at joinus@dify.ai.
