Ines Montani

Co-founder and CEO of Explosion, the company behind spaCy and Prodigy

@_inesmontani Berlin, Germany20K followersOpen Source Makers AI Builders Developer Tools

About Ines Montani

Ines Montani is a software developer working on AI and natural language processing tools, and the co-founder and CEO of Explosion, the Berlin-based company behind the open source NLP library spaCy and the annotation tool Prodigy. They founded Explosion in 2016 with Matthew Honnibal, spaCy's original author, shortly after spaCy's first releases, and remain a core developer of the library.

Explosion was bootstrapped through consulting for its first months and then funded by software sales. Consulting work showed that serious spaCy users needed a fast way to create training data, which led to Prodigy in 2017: a scriptable, self-hosted annotation tool sold as a paid license that became the company's main revenue source while spaCy stayed free.

After years of running profitably, Explosion sold a minority stake to raise venture capital in 2021 and grew to roughly 20-30 people to build Prodigy Teams. In July 2024 the founders announced a return to a small, self-sufficient, independent company with no further VC, backed by Prodigy sales, a Hugging Face grant for open source work and a German R&D grant. Explosion is now also building Ellf, an assistant for agentic NLP development.

Montani is a well-known conference speaker and teacher. They created the free interactive course Advanced NLP with spaCy, available in several languages, and a spaCy 101 zine, and have guest-lectured at universities in Germany.

Products by Ines Montani

spaCy

spacy.io

Free, open source library for industrial-strength natural language processing in Python.

Prodigy

prodi.gy

Scriptable, self-hosted annotation tool for creating training and evaluation data for machine learning models.

Ellf

beta.ellf.ai

Assistant for agentic NLP development, currently in beta.

Ines Montani's journey, 2016–20265 milestones · self-reported

First product
Funding
Launch / milestone
Started 2016

2016Launch: Co-founded Explosion in Berlin with Matthew Honnibal
2017First product: Launched Prodigy, the paid annotation tool that funded the…
2021Funding: Sold a minority stake and raised VC
2024Launch: Announced a return to a small
2026Milestone: Explosion marked its tenth anniversary

Timeline

2016 — Co-founded Explosion in Berlin with Matthew Honnibal, bootstrapping it through consulting.
2017 — Launched Prodigy, the paid annotation tool that funded the company.
2021 — Explosion sold a minority stake and raised venture capital to build Prodigy Teams.
2024 — Announced a return to a small, independent, self-sufficient company with no further VC.
2026 — Explosion marked its tenth anniversary.

How Ines builds

Fund open source with a focused paid product instead of locking down the free library.
Stay small, independent and profitable rather than chasing venture-scale growth.
Build developer tools that are scriptable and give users full control over their data.
Good training data matters as much as the model.

Learn from Ines Montani

[course]Free

Advanced NLP with spaCy

Free interactive online course in four chapters, available in seven languages.

by Ines Montani

Ines Montani FAQ

What is Ines Montani known for?

Ines Montani co-founded Explosion with Matthew Honnibal and is its CEO; the company makes the open source NLP library spaCy and the annotation tool Prodigy.