Jan Čurn is the co-founder and chief executive of Apify, a Prague-rooted platform for web scraping, browser automation, and software that AI agents can discover and use. He is building an agentic economy where specialized tools can be found, authorized, purchased, and combined without requiring every integration to be assembled by hand.
From web crawlers to autonomous software
Čurn studied at Charles University, where he met Apify co-founder Jakub Balada, and completed a doctorate at Trinity College Dublin; his 2014 dissertation examined correlated estimation problems and the ensemble Kalman filter. Earlier, he worked in custom software development and co-founded VirtualRig Studio in 2009.
In 2015, Čurn and Balada launched Apify through the Y Combinator Fellowship in Mountain View. Originally named Apifier, their product used headless browsers and JavaScript to help developers extract information from increasingly dynamic websites. They returned to the Czech Republic in 2016, raised seed funding, and expanded into web scraping and browser automation.
Čurn introduced an open-source JavaScript scraping library in 2018. His 2019 marketplace blueprint imagined developers publishing, selling, and running reusable cloud software—a vision that now underpins Apify’s approach to AI agents.
Its core building blocks are Apify Actors: Docker-based programs with defined inputs and outputs that can collect web data, automate browsers, or process information. Independent developers publish and monetize Actors alongside Apify’s own tools, while APIs, command-line interfaces, and Python and TypeScript integrations make them accessible to other software.
- Dynamic tool discovery: Loading an entire marketplace into a model’s context is impractical. Čurn uses the Model Context Protocol to let agents locate relevant tools and add their interfaces only when needed, reducing context overhead and making large software catalogs usable.
- Agent identity and payments: Discovering a service does not provide credentials, authorization, or billing. Čurn’s marketplace model allows tool developers to manage external integrations and payment while agents connect through a shared account and interface.
- Nested MCP integrations: An Actor can expose another service’s capabilities through Apify’s marketplace. Čurn demonstrated the pattern with Browserbase, connecting browser automation to an agent through an intermediary integration.
- Operationally useful interoperability: Čurn introduced mcpc, a universal MCP command-line client, and MCP connectors to address repeated authentication, fragmented configuration, and inefficient tool loading.
Čurn continues publishing tools through his personal Apify account. His public positions combine enthusiasm for MCP with skepticism about premature machine-payment infrastructure: at AI Engineer World’s Fair in 2026, he defended MCP while questioning x402’s readiness. He also considers collective intelligence emerging from interacting agents plausible, while treating trust, reliability, and autonomous commerce as unresolved engineering problems.
