Jan Čurn co-founded and leads Apify, a platform for collecting web data and running browser automation. His earlier research studied how a network of sensors can combine uncertain information without becoming falsely confident.[1][3]
Start with The Apify origin story →
GitHub 
X Background
His Trinity doctorate concerns the Ensemble Kalman Filter, a method for estimating a changing system from noisy measurements. When sensors share past information, their errors can be related. Treating those observations as independent can make an estimate too confident. The thesis proposes update rules that estimate those correlations from random samples, then tests them in localization problems. Trinity’s research-student record dates the thesis to 2014. JIC’s speaker biography also records study at Charles University.[3][4][6]
Career
Čurn and Jakub Balada developed Apify from a problem they encountered as consultants: collecting real-estate information reliably from dynamic websites. Their company’s history describes earlier extraction tools failing when a site changed or required JavaScript rendering. They built a crawler around PhantomJS, then turned it into a cloud application during the 2015 Y Combinator Fellowship. The original product was called Apifier. Its promise was to let developers define a crawler without separately operating servers, proxies and scheduled jobs.[2]
Contributions
Apify extends that initial idea into reusable web-data and automation tools. Čurn’s official profile lists published Actors, the platform’s name for runnable tools, alongside his company role. His speaker profile describes a marketplace through which AI agents can discover web-data tools and argues that tool protocols create opportunities for agents to use outside services.[1][5]
Tools, writing & talks
Writing, research & talks
Start here
The Apify origin storyblog.apify.comCompany history explaining the extraction problem, early crawler and transition to a hosted product.
Read the origin story first for the practical problem the company set out to solve. It needs no programming background; the thesis is a later route for readers comfortable with probability.
Featured co-founder; company-published history.[2]Apify's founder walks the agent payment funnel across need, setup, discovery and purchase, arguing why API keys still beat new payment standards and where pay-per-use billing and crypto fit.
Catalog workOriginal sourceApify's CEO argues the MCP backlash targets client implementations, not the protocol, and covers sub-agents, progressive discovery, Code Mode, and CLI versus MCP, with a demo of the mcpc client.
Catalog workOriginal sourceDoctoral research on combining correlated sensor information without overconfident estimates.
Thesis author.[3]
Tools
- Jan Čurn’s Apify toolsapify.com
Official profile linking his published Actors and professional accounts.
Profile owner and publisher of listed tools.[1]
