Geniunely asking since I do wonder what their USP is and why it's worth 2.5B.
n8n offers an orchestration, integration, ETL platform as SaaS/PaaS (plus self-hosted).
For many medium sized and enterprise companies such a service is as important as the data platform from Databricks. From my personal experience in a small EU-wide enterprise in finance sector, the budget for the data platform is in the lower 7digits/year. For automation and workflows multiple solutions in place. Some are outdated for years (on mainframes) or with an EoL in the next years (due to retirements in-house or at the datacenter provider).
Since decades such companies externalize their own business logic – formally running on homegrown software – to SaaS vendors. Established workflows are quite often not able to integrate these kind of "modern" integration. REST? GraphQL? WebSocket? We speak SOAP and FTP!
So, from my point of view n8n is a valid solution in a growing market.
I don't know but their sudden heavy adaption of AI will have detrimental affects on their other business such as integration of less "sexy" basic services such as FTP and SOAP.
I guess it all comes down to how well Claude and Co. work with integrating legacy systems based on priority protocols (in part). Because I assume that's the kind of systems that are coming up for retirement.
Like Databricks with no consumer products, no side gig, single product, but 100 billion valuation[1]?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sasirekhasubramanian/2025/10/07...