Web data scraping infrastructure startup Oxylabs reels in $130M in its first 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.
