Web data scraping infrastructure startup Oxylabs reels in $130M in its first ever funding round

Data scraping startup Oxylabs UAB has broken into unicorn territory after raising $130 million in funding from the private equity firm Warburg Pincus LLC. The round is the first time the bootstrapped company has ever sought outside funding, and lifts its valuation to a cool $3.6 billion, it said today.

The Lithuanian startup provides artificial intelligence model developers with the comprehensive infrastructure they need to collect publicly available internet data at the enormous scale required to train advanced frontier models. Founded in 2015, it was originally a premium web proxy service provider, a kind of tool that routes requests through many different URLs in order to collect prices, listings and security data without getting blocked.

Nowadays, Oxylabs positions itself as more of a “web intelligence” platform, capable of handling billions of requests per day on behalf of its customers. Its proxy service has access to a pool of over 175 million “ethically-sourced” consumer device IPs, which allow it to scrape internet data at scale without being hindered by IP bans, CAPTCHA tools and geo-restrictions. It also provides a collection of tools to developers, such as its fully-managed Web Scraper API data collection tool, and Web Unblocker, an AI-native proxy manager that automatically bypasses anti-scraping systems. Besides scraping data to build vast training datasets for AI models, Oxylabs can also help autonomous AI agents that do work on behalf of humans to navigate the internet at scale. With its stealthy Headless Browser, agents have the perfect tool for extracting data from heavy dynamic websites.

Oxylabs co-founder and Chief Executive Vytautas Savickas said his company’s tools are essential to enable the agentic web. He points out that AI agents already browse the web more than humans do. “They need a live feed of what is out there, not a stale index,” he said. “The next generation of AI won’t be powered by static indexes.”

The amount of money raised is impressive for a company that was entirely bootstrapped until now. The company reckons it sees big demand for its web scraping services, counting more than 350,000 customers globally, which have helped it grow its annual recurring revenue to more than $350 million. Oxylabs will use the funds to expand its global network and build the next generation of web scraping tools. “The future belongs to the live infrastructure that grounds these systems in real-time, interruption free knowledge,” Savickas said.

Ethical questions

The capital may also help Oxylabs to navigate the general controversy that surrounds the practice of web scraping. AI companies such as OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC have come in for heavy criticism for the way they have basically just helped themselves to the world’s biggest dataset, gobbling up billions of articles, images and movies posted online, without offering a cent in compensation to the people who created all of that data.

OpenAI, Anthropic and other leading AI model makers have been sued many times for their web scraping practices, but the companies that aid them in this haven’t gone unnoticed. Last year, Reddit Inc. slapped Perplexity AI Inc. and three data-scraping service providers – including Oxylabs – with a lawsuit, accusing them of trawling through its copyrighted content. It famously compared Oxylabs and the others to “bank robbers,” saying that they will do almost anything to access its data – except pay for it.

Fact is, large-scale web scraping is a bit of a legal grey area, and Oxylabs recognizes this, trying to position itself as one of the industry’s most ethical scraping services providers, if such a thing is possible. The company strives to maintain compliance with European Union laws on data collection, which are some of the strictest in the world, and it’s also a founding member of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative. Known as EWDCI, it’s an international industry-led consortium and working group that’s trying to establish ethical standards and best practices for the data aggregation industry. It sits under the umbrella of the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, and acts as a kind of regulatory framework for data collection firms that want to maintain digital trust.

Regardless of the controversy around web scraping, there is no denying that companies like Oxylabs are emerging as critical players within the broader AI industry. While AI agents get most of the headlines for coding, creating graphics, making movies and automating business tasks, they wouldn’t be able to do any of that without the data infrastructure that Oxylabs provides.

The money comes from Warburg’s $4 billion Capital Solutions Founders Fund, which has previously backed another Lithuanian startup, Nord Security UAB, the creator of NordVPN. It now has a sizable stake in Lithuania’s two biggest technology firms. “Oxylabs has established itself as a leader in web intelligence through its sophisticated technology and expansive network,” said Warburg Pincus Principal Allison Ross.

Image: Oxylabs