# Airweave

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/airweave/ · added 2026-11-06 · updated 2026-11-06

**In short.** Airweave (Open-source context retrieval layer that lets AI agents search a company's apps and databases through one API, United States (San Francisco, per its Y Combinator page)): US$17K a month reported, July 2025. Evidence grade D: reported, not verified. Team: 2 co-founders, Lennert Jansen (CEO) and Rauf Akdemir (CTO), in 2025; 7 employees on the Y Combinator page in November 2026, after a US$6M seed round in July 2025. Launched 16 May 2025; still running.

Open-source context retrieval layer that lets AI agents search a company's apps and databases through one API · United States (San Francisco, per its Y Combinator page) · AI-native · team of 2 to 10 · still running · group: Developer tools and coding agents

- Outcome: US$17K a month reported, July 2025 (evidence grade of the headline number: D; headline in US dollars: 204000)
- Launch: 16 May 2025; months from launch to the outcome: 2
- Team: 2 co-founders, Lennert Jansen (CEO) and Rauf Akdemir (CTO), in 2025; 7 employees on the Y Combinator page in November 2026, after a US$6M seed round in July 2025
- Outside funding: Y Combinator (Spring 2025) and a US$6M seed round led by FCVC, announced 2 July 2025
- Main factor: Open source
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 1, capital needed 2
- Tags: AI-native, Small team, Funded, Running, B2B, Developer tools

Links:

- Visit airweave.ai: https://airweave.ai/

**The product.** Airweave connects to a company's apps, documents and databases (the GitHub page lists more than 50 integrations), copies their data into its own index and keeps it in sync, and then answers search requests from AI agents through one interface: Python and TypeScript SDKs, a REST API, or an MCP server. The code is open source under the MIT license; the company also sells a hosted version, and its home page lists a Pro plan at US$16 a month.

**Why it worked.** Every AI agent that must answer from private data needs a connector for each app and a search index that stays current. Airweave sells that layer once, for many agents. The founders said in their seed announcement that it began as a fix for their own problem: agents could not search their apps. Made With Models reported in July 2025 that the founder said the company was making US$17,000 a month.

Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; E = no revenue figure found, so the headline is a non-money fact and the other facts carry their own grades; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

Airweave is a context retrieval layer: a service that sits between AI agents and a company's data sources and returns the pieces of data that are relevant to a question. It connects to apps such as Gmail, Stripe and document stores, syncs their contents into a searchable collection, and offers semantic search (search by meaning, using vector representations of text, not only by matching words) together with keyword and hybrid search. Agents call it through an SDK, a REST API or MCP, the Model Context Protocol, a standard way for an AI model to call outside tools.

Lennert Jansen and Rauf Akdemir founded it in 2025, according to its Y Combinator page, and presented it on Launch YC on 16 May 2025 in the Spring 2025 batch. On 2 July 2025 the company posted that it had raised a US$6 million seed round led by FCVC. Made With Models, a directory of AI money claims, listed in July 2025 that Jansen said Airweave was making US$17,000 a month, and it marks the number as a maker claim with no proof shown. The directory also reports that the first prototype was built with the AI app builder Lovable.

This page could not read the original interview: Made With Models cites a Forbes Australia copy of a Forbes article, and Forbes does not allow Claude agents. So the headline number is grade D, reported once and not verified. The page also shows earlier companies that tried to be the single connection point between software and many outside apps.

## Pricing

Airweave hosted plans on its home page, read 6 November 2026 (grade C)

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Developer | 0 | 0 | 10 source connections, 50 queries and 50,000 synced entities a month |
| Pro |  | 16 | 50 source connections, 500 queries and 100,000 synced entities a month, 2 team members |
| Startup |  | 239 | 1,000 source connections, 5,000 queries and 1 million synced entities a month, 10 team members |
| Enterprise | custom | custom | unlimited source connections, custom usage limits |

The home page shows monthly prices and a switch for yearly billing marked "save 20 %"; the yearly prices themselves load by script and were not read. The open-source version can be self-hosted for free with Docker. Enterprise adds custom integrations, on-premises deployment, single sign-on, role-based access control and service-level agreements.

## How much revenue does Airweave make? The numbers, graded

A founder figure of US$17,000 a month in July 2025, known only through a directory that quotes a press interview; the funding and the team size come from the company and Y Combinator

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue per month, July 2025 | US$17,000 (reported) | D | Made With Models receipt, dated July 2025: "Now Airweave is making $17,000 a month and just landed $6 million in funding." Marked "Maker claim. The maker states the number, with no proof shown." Its source is a Forbes Australia copy of a Forbes article, which this page could not read. | [1] |
| Run rate from the July 2025 figure | about US$204,000 a year | calc | Calculated: US$17,000 times 12. Not stated by any source. | [1] |
| Second listing of the same figure | US$17,000 MRR, "maker claim" | D | Vibe Shipped, updated 21 October 2026, repeats the Made With Models figure and says the linked source does not show processor or dashboard evidence. It is not an independent second source. | [2] |
| Founders | Lennert Jansen (Founder/CEO) and Rauf Akdemir (Founder/CTO) | C | Y Combinator company page: "Founded in 2025 by Rauf Akdemir and Lennert Jansen". Made With Models lists the team as "2 cofounders". | [3, 1] |
| Team, November 2026 | 7 employees, hiring for 5 engineering roles | C | Y Combinator company page, read 6 November 2026. The open roles are titled "Founding Software Engineer" and "Founding Forward Deployed Engineer". | [3] |
| Accelerator | Y Combinator, Spring 2025 batch | C | Y Combinator company page. | [3] |
| Launch YC post | 16 May 2025, "Airweave - Let Agents Search Any App" | C | Date from the launch record embedded in the Y Combinator company page. | [3] |
| Seed round | US$6 million, led by FCVC | C | Company blog, 2 July 2025, with LUX Capital, Y Combinator, Orange Collective, Pioneer Fund and Shay Banon (founder of Elastic) among the investors. | [4] |
| Prices | free Developer plan; Pro US$16 a month; Startup US$239 a month; Enterprise custom | C | Home page pricing section, read 6 November 2026. | [5] |
| Open-source repository | about 6,500 stars and 819 forks, MIT license | C | GitHub page airweave-ai/airweave, read 6 November 2026. | [6] |
| Integrations | more than 50 | C | GitHub page: "Connect your apps, databases, and documents (50+ integrations)". | [6] |
| Time from the Launch YC post to the July 2025 figure | 2 months | calc | Calculated: May 2025 to July 2025. | [3, 1] |

How to read this table: a grade D value was reported once and not checked. A grade C value is the company's own statement on its pages or on its Y Combinator profile. A grade X value was calculated on this page. No value is grade A or B.

## When did Airweave launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From a Y Combinator launch to a seed round in seven weeks. Each entry carries its grade.

- **2025** (grade C [3, 1]): Lennert Jansen and Rauf Akdemir found Airweave. Made With Models reports that a prototype built with Lovable won the company its Y Combinator place.
- **16 May 2025** (grade C [3]): Launch YC post "Airweave - Let Agents Search Any App", in the Spring 2025 batch.
- **2 July 2025** (grade C [4]): The company announces a US$6 million seed round led by FCVC and says it is building a small team of engineers.
- **July 2025** (grade D [1]): Made With Models reports the founder's statement that Airweave is making US$17,000 a month.
- **3 December 2025** (grade C [5]): Company blog post on Donke, an error-monitoring agent the team built on Airweave itself.
- **November 2026** (grade C [5, 3, 6]): Hosted plans from free to US$239 a month plus Enterprise; 7 employees; about 6,500 GitHub stars.

## Why did Airweave work?

### Open source as the sales channel

The full product is on GitHub under the MIT license and runs with one script and Docker. Engineers try it for free, and the hosted plans sell the part they do not want to run themselves: syncing, scaling and support. About 6,500 people had starred the repository by November 2026.

### One layer for many agents

The home page compares it with a retrieval pipeline built for each application: Airweave keeps one synced index that several agents and applications can reuse, so a team writes each connector once.

### Usage limits as the price ladder

Plans differ by the number of source connections, queries and synced entities a month, from 50 queries on the free plan to 5,000 on the Startup plan, so the price grows with the amount of data an agent searches.

### Fast prototype, then a rewrite

Made With Models reports that the first prototype was built with Lovable, an AI app builder. The current stack on GitHub is FastAPI in Python, React with TypeScript, PostgreSQL, the Vespa search engine for vectors and Temporal for background jobs.

## How it was built

These details come from the GitHub page, the company's site and the Made With Models summary. They are grade C, except the Lovable prototype, which is a press report quoted by a directory.

- Backend: FastAPI (Python). Frontend: React and TypeScript with the ShadCN components.
- Databases: PostgreSQL for metadata and Vespa for vectors. Workers: Temporal for orchestration and Redis for publish and subscribe.
- Deployment: Docker Compose for development and Kubernetes in production, per the GitHub page.
- Access for agents: Python and TypeScript SDKs, a REST API, an MCP server and integrations with agent frameworks.
- Search modes listed on the home page: semantic, keyword, hybrid, time-aware and agentic search.
- First prototype built with Lovable, per Made With Models; no source says which embedding or language models the hosted service calls.

Sources: [6, 5, 1]

## Who tried this before Airweave, and why did they fail?

Three companies in our database of failed startups tried to be the single connection point between software and many outside apps or a team's scattered knowledge. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.

The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade.

### Singly (2011 to 2016; funding US$2.7M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: One API to collect and sync user data from many social networks and online services.
- Why it died: It depended on third-party APIs that changed and limited access, and broader automation tools such as Zapier and IFTTT took the market.
- Record: 

### Niles (2017 to 2020; funding US$2.8M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: A Slack bot that answered questions from a team's collected knowledge.
- Why it died: Slack and knowledge tools built similar features themselves, and the AI of the time was not accurate enough to make it sticky.
- Record: 

### Solid (2017 to 2025; funding US$81M; cause: Unit Economics)

- Promise: A unified API layer to connect CRMs, ERPs, HR systems and other business software.
- Why it died: Each enterprise system had its own quirks, so sales cycles were long and support costs too high for the revenue.
- Record: 

## What changed

Singly and Solid sold a unified connection to many outside systems and were worn down by the cost of keeping every connector working; Niles sold answers from a team's knowledge before language models could give them reliably.

Airweave sells the same kind of connector layer, but its buyer is now an AI agent that that needs current data from many apps. It also puts the connectors in open source, so outside contributors can add and repair them. Whether that keeps the maintenance cost below what Solid faced is not shown by any source: the only revenue figure, US$17,000 a month in July 2025, was stated by the founder and reported once.

## Can one person copy Airweave now?

**Verdict: The open-source method, yes. The funded start, not for one person.**

A solo founder can publish an open-source developer tool and sell a hosted version with usage-based plans. Airweave itself is a funded company of seven with a seed round and Y Combinator behind it, and its many connectors need steady maintenance.

1. Pick one piece of infrastructure that every AI agent builder needs and that you needed yourself.
2. Publish the code under a permissive license with a one-command local setup.
3. Sell the hosted version with a free tier and plans priced by usage limits.
4. Offer the agent-native interfaces (SDK, REST, MCP) on day one.

**What is still open.** Narrower retrieval layers for one kind of data or one industry, where a small team can keep a few connectors in very good shape.

## What could go wrong for Airweave?

- **What is not verified.** The only revenue figure, US$17,000 a month, rests on one statement by co-founder Lennert Jansen, reported by Made With Models with the date July 2025 and marked as a maker claim with no proof shown. Its source is a Forbes Australia copy of a Forbes article of July 2025; Forbes does not allow Claude agents, so this page did not use that copy and could not read the original. Vibe Shipped repeats the same figure and is not an independent source. A reader could look for a payment-processor profile, a later founder interview or an investor statement with a dated revenue figure.
- **Funded team, not a solo business.** Two co-founders started it in 2025. It raised a US$6 million seed round in July 2025, and in November 2026 its Y Combinator page lists 7 employees and 5 open engineering roles, so the team may grow past 10.
- **Competition.** Close neighbours on this site are Moss (a semantic search runtime for voice agents) and Metorial (an open-source MCP gateway for agents); large search and data companies also sell retrieval for AI agents.
- **Depends on model providers and other companies' APIs.** No downloaded source names the embedding or language models the hosted service calls, so the dependence on model providers is not known. Every connector depends on another company's API (Gmail, Stripe and the rest), and the Singly and Solid records show how changes in those APIs raise the cost of a connector business.
- **Unsourced customer claims.** The home page says "Trusted by engineering teams building the future" but the downloaded page shows no named customers or case studies.

## Sources

1. Made With Models, receipt: How Lennert Jansen makes $17,000 a month with Airweave (July 2025) — https://madewithmodels.com/money/receipts/airweave/ (grade D). Read in full. Source for the US$17,000 figure, its date, the maker-claim label, the team of 2 co-founders and the Lovable prototype. It cites a Forbes Australia reprint of a Forbes article that this page did not use.
2. Vibe Shipped: Airweave, developer tools app built with Lovable — https://vibeshipped.io/ship/airweave (grade D). Read in full. Repeats the Made With Models figure; updated 21 October 2026.
3. Y Combinator company page: Airweave — https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/airweave (grade C). Read the page and its embedded company data. Source for the founders, year founded, batch, Launch YC date, team size and open roles.
4. Airweave blog, 2 July 2025: Airweave Raises $6M Seed Round — https://airweave.ai/blog/airweave-raises-6m-seed-round (grade C). Read in full. Source for the seed round, its investors and the origin of the product.
5. Airweave home page, read 6 November 2026 — https://airweave.ai/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the product description, the search modes, the plans and prices, and the blog list. The separate /pricing address returned 404.
6. GitHub: airweave-ai/airweave — https://github.com/airweave-ai/airweave (grade C). Read the repository page. Source for the license, stars, forks, integrations count, interfaces and tech stack.
7. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.

Contact: aiolum@livyden.com. Run Airweave? Send corrections or a verified figure to aiolum@livyden.com (subject: Correction: Airweave).