Aitken made two iPad apps that won Apple's iPad App of the Year before co-founding Trigger.dev, an open-source platform that runs long background jobs and AI agents written in TypeScript.
Matt Aitken is co-founder and CEO of Trigger.dev, a London, England, company from Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch whose open-source platform runs long-running background jobs and AI agents written in TypeScript.
Winning Apple iPad App of the Year
Aitken is a programmer who created two iPad apps that went on to win Apple's iPad App of the Year award, according to his Y Combinator profile. He has worked on several startups.
Building JSON Hero
With co-founder Eric Allam and the rest of the founding team, he built JSON Hero, an open-source JSON viewer that Y Combinator says more than 35,000 developers use each month. Allam had been CTO of Code School, an early code-learning platform acquired in 2015. Trigger.dev began as a developer-first, open-source alternative to Zapier for automation workflows that live in a team's own codebase.
Running AI Agents on Trigger.dev
Trigger.dev now pitches itself as the open-source platform for building AI agents in TypeScript. In a December 2025 company post, it said more than 30,000 developers use it to run hundreds of millions of agents each month, and it calls itself a US-style startup based in Europe. Runs have no maximum duration, and the company says on its pricing page that some users have runs lasting more than six months.
