Explosion

Explosion is a software company that focuses on delivering developer tools tailored for artificial intelligence and natural language processing, with a special emphasis on spaCy development.

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Overview

Number of Employees

11-50

Average Hourly Rate

$150 - $299

Minimum Project Size

$25,000+

Year Founded

2016

Explosion is a bootstrapped software company founded in October 2016 in Berlin, Germany. The company is best known as the creator of spaCy, one of the world’s most widely used open source NLP libraries, with more than 40 million downloads.

Explosion develops tools for AI, machine learning, and natural language processing teams. Its product suite includes spaCy for advanced NLP in Python, Prodigy for data annotation and model training, Thinc as a functional deep learning library, and Ellf, a new agentic NLP development platform currently in beta.

The company also provides Tailored Solutions, offering custom NLP consulting for enterprises in finance, legal, biomedical, media, and humanities domains. Explosion’s philosophy centers on open source values, strong developer experience, transparency, and responsible AI systems that teams can own, understand, and maintain.