The LSE Directory / Alternative data
Bright Data is an Israeli web data infrastructure company that sells access to public web data through three linked product lines: a proxy network (residential, ISP, datacenter and mobile IP addresses that route a customer's requests so they appear to originate from real end user devices), a set of scraping tools (Web Scraper API, SERP API, Web Unlocker and Scraping Browser) that handle CAPTCHA solving, browser fingerprinting and IP rotation on the customer's behalf, and a marketplace of pre-built, regularly refreshed datasets covering domains such as e-commerce listings, job postings, real estate and social media. Customers pull data through APIs or download static datasets rather than build and maintain their own scraping infrastructure. Its differentiation is scale and legal defensibility rather than a narrow vertical focus. Its residential proxy network draws on more than 400 million IP addresses across 195 countries by the company's own account, and it has fought and won court challenges from Meta (January 2024) and X Corp, formerly Twitter (May 2024), over the legality of scraping publicly accessible social media data, rulings it now markets as evidence that its collection methods are compliant. Its customer base spans e-commerce and price intelligence, market research, travel, ad tech and brand protection teams, but by 2025 to 2026 its fastest growing segment was AI: it states it supplies web data to 14 of the top 20 large language model labs and seven of the top 10 self-described AI-first companies, and has begun packaging retrieval products aimed at AI agents, such as Deep Lookup and Browser.ai, alongside its original scraping and proxy tools. The company was founded in 2014 in Israel as Luminati Networks, a spinoff of co-founder Ofer Vilenski's peer to peer VPN service Hola, whose users' idle bandwidth originally powered the proxy network; Derry Shribman is named as the other co-founder. UK based EMK Capital bought Luminati for a reported figure of roughly 200 million dollars in 2017, and the company rebranded to Bright Data in March 2021 under current CEO Or Lenchner. It says it now serves more than 20,000 customer organizations, and industry trackers reported annual recurring revenue crossing 300 million dollars in 2025, up from roughly 128 million dollars in 2024, with management guidance toward 400 million dollars ARR by mid-2026. In 2018 it won a 7.5 million dollar patent infringement judgment against rival proxy provider Oxylabs, a case later sent to mediation. It also runs the Bright Initiative, a program giving free data access to academic and nonprofit organizations, which it says includes roughly 700 partner organizations and about 300 academic institutions. Through mid-2026 the company has been repositioning around what it calls "right licensing" for AI: framing itself less as a scraping tool vendor and more as an infrastructure and licensing intermediary between website owners and AI companies, a stance it has tied directly to its 2024 litigation wins against Meta and X Corp.
