Dify bets agentic workflows belong in an open-source platform; $30M at $180M

Dify is an open-source LLM application development platform founded in March 2023 by Luyu Zhang, a self-taught coder from Anhui who started building websites in middle school and later led products at Tencent. Zhang's thesis was that generative AI would structurally reshape how organizations work, and that the tooling for building AI applications should be accessible to everyone, not just well-resourced engineering teams. The repository was open-sourced on May 15, 2023.

The product sits between AI models and business systems: a visual builder for workflows, RAG pipelines and agents, with model management and deployment options spanning cloud, VPC and self-hosted. By June 2025 the repository had crossed 100,000 GitHub stars, placing Dify among the top 100 open-source projects globally; by March 2026 it claimed to be the 51st most-starred repository on GitHub, running on more than 1.4 million machines across 175 countries, with over 2,000 teams and 280 enterprises including Maersk, ETS, Anker Innovations and Novartis.

On March 9, 2026, Dify announced a $30M Series Pre-A led by HSG (formerly Sequoia Capital China) at a $180M valuation, with participation from GL Ventures, Alt-Alpha Capital, 5Y Capital, Mizuho Leaguer Investment and NYX Ventures. The company said the round would fund production-ready agents and workflows, enterprise foundations such as compliance and auditability, lower barriers for non-developers, and a healthier open-source ecosystem.

The company operates from San Francisco, Tokyo, Shanghai and Suzhou, and Zhang relocated to the US in 2025, telling Forbes through VnExpress that Silicon Valley is the arena where an AI infrastructure company must compete. The bet — that open-source, visual tooling would become the default way teams build agentic workflows — is still being validated as the company scales.