The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2022–2025
Windmill's code-first bet: open-source scripts beat no-code for internal tools
Paris startup Windmill bet developers want code-first, open-source workflows over no-code tools; YC S22, 16,500+ GitHub stars, $2.7M ARR by 2024.
Windmill (Windmill Labs)
What the business is
Windmill is a code-first, open-source developer platform: developers write scripts in Python, TypeScript, Go, Bash or SQL, and the platform turns each script into a workflow, an auto-generated internal UI, and a webhook or API endpoint.
Starting capital：About $8M in two disclosed rounds: a $3M seed from Pentland Ventures and Next Play Ventures, and a $5M Series A on 2024-10-08 led by Super Angel and Dot Capital.
How it started
Ruben Fiszel, an EPFL computer-science graduate who led developer tools at Palantir, founded Windmill in 2022 and took it through Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch. His position was that no-code tools are 'code made by an opinionated someone else, hidden as a black box', so Windmill let teams write normal scripts and made them production-grade, composable artifacts instead.
What happened
Windmill built a dual headquarters in Paris, where most engineering sits, and San Francisco, launched publicly on Hacker News in May and August 2022, and grew the open-source repository past 16,500 stars. In October 2024 it raised a $5M Series A from Super Angel and Dot Capital, following a $3M seed, and productgrowth.in's December 2025 review reported $2.7M ARR on an 18-person team, up from $900K the prior year, with 89+ releases during 2025.
How it ended up
Windmill is still live and scaling: it reports a production-grade AGPL community edition, paid Team and Enterprise tiers, customers using self-hosted deployments, and continued open-source momentum measured in stars, releases and contributors rather than venture capital.
Background
Windmill was founded in Paris in 2022 by Ruben Fiszel, an EPFL graduate who previously led developer tools at Palantir, and went through Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch. Its bet was that developers would choose plain code over no-code platforms: write a Python or TypeScript script, and Windmill turns it into a scheduled workflow, an auto-generated internal UI and a webhook, all self-hostable under an open-source license.
The company launched publicly on Hacker News twice in 2022 — the windmill.dev discussion drew 245 points in May and the Launch HN drew 212 points with 79 comments in August — and the open-source repository at windmill-labs/windmill crossed 16,500 GitHub stars by December 2025, with 89+ releases during that year.
Windmill raised about $8M in two disclosed rounds, a $3M seed from Pentland Ventures and Next Play Ventures followed by a $5M Series A on 8 October 2024 led by Super Angel and Dot Capital. productgrowth.in's December 2025 review reported 2024 ARR of $2.7M on an 18-person team, up from $900K the previous year, making it one of the more capital-efficient developer platforms to come out of a YC batch.
The company now operates with engineering in Paris and go-to-market in San Francisco, selling Team and Enterprise tiers on top of a free AGPL community edition. Its open question is whether it can keep compounding developer adoption as rivals such as n8n, Retool and Temporal push deeper into the same script-to-workflow space.
What has to be true
- No-code tools win when the problem fits the tool exactly, but they become rigid tech debt otherwise; Windmill bet that code with auto-generated UI was a more honest middle ground.
- Open source let Windmill reach enterprises without a sales team: teams inside Fortune 500 companies adopted the self-hosted edition for visibility and data control.
- Y Combinator gave the company distribution and a founder network, while the founders' Palantir and compiler backgrounds shaped a product aimed at senior engineers.
- Capital efficiency made the bet durable: two small rounds funded an 18-person team to $2.7M ARR, so Windmill never needed hyper-growth metrics to survive.
What can be applied
In developer tools, openness is a distribution channel: Windmill reached enterprise teams through a self-hostable open-source edition before it had a sales force.
Aftermath
As of late 2025, Windmill is a live, scaling developer platform with a free AGPL community edition, paid tiers, and engineering in Paris. The windmill-labs/windmill repository had crossed 16,500 GitHub stars with 89+ releases during 2025, and productgrowth.in's December review reported $2.7M ARR on an 18-person team, up from $900K the year before. It has raised about $8M in two disclosed rounds, including a $5M Series A in October 2024, and positions itself as a code-first alternative to Retool, n8n, Temporal and Airflow rather than a venture-funded growth story.
Sources
- Launch HN: Windmill (YC S22) – Turn scripts into internal apps and workflows
- Windmill.dev
- Windmill Open-Source Developer Platform
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.
Your turn
You just read one. Describe what you are building, and see who is betting on the same thing.
Free account · 3 free questions · no card