Lithuania's Oxylabs takes its first outside investment after more than a decade of bootstrapped growth
Lithuania-based Oxylabs has spent more than a decade building technology that most internet users never see.
The Vilnius company provides enterprise infrastructure—including proxy networks, web scraping tools and browser automation—that organisations use to access, extract and structure publicly available online data at scale. Its products support applications ranging from market intelligence and cybersecurity to e-commerce, academic research and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.
After growing without institutional funding since its founding in 2015, Oxylabs has now accepted its first outside investment.
Global private equity firm Warburg Pincus has invested $130 million in the company through its Capital Solutions Founders Fund. The transaction values Oxylabs at approximately $3.6 billion, according to the companies, making it one of Lithuania's highest-valued technology businesses.
The investment marks a significant milestone not simply because of its size, but because it represents a strategic turning point for the company itself. After more than a decade of growing independently, Oxylabs has chosen to bring in an institutional investor as it prepares for its next phase of expansion.
According to Oxylabs, the investment will be used to strengthen its global public web data infrastructure, accelerate product development and support continued international growth.
Chief executive Vytautas Savickas believes the timing reflects a broader change in how AI systems will interact with information.
"The next generation of AI won't be powered by static indexes that only capture yesterday's internet. As AI agents begin to navigate the web far more than humans ever have, the future belongs to the live infrastructure that grounds these systems in real-time, interruption free knowledge," he said when announcing the investment.
Beyond web scraping
Although often described simply as a web scraping company, Oxylabs' business today spans a much broader range of technologies.
Its platform combines proxy infrastructure, browser automation, data extraction tools and AI-driven products designed to help organisations work with publicly available online information at enterprise scale. According to the company, its technology is used by more than 350,000 technology teams worldwide, including teams within Fortune Global 500 organisations, and it reports annual recurring revenue of $350 million.
Those figures are notable because they suggest Oxylabs had already reached considerable scale before accepting outside capital.
Unlike many venture-backed technology companies, its growth has not been driven by successive funding rounds. Instead, the company has expanded organically for more than a decade before deciding to partner with an institutional investor.
The announcement does not explain why Oxylabs concluded this was the right moment to do so. What it does make clear is that the company intends to accelerate investment in infrastructure supporting AI-related products and services.
AI's growing appetite for live information
The transaction also comes at a time when the AI ecosystem itself is changing.
The first wave of generative AI largely centred on foundation models trained on enormous historical datasets. Increasingly, however, AI systems are being designed to retrieve and work with information that changes continuously.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables language models to consult external documents before generating responses. More recently, AI agents have begun carrying out tasks that involve searching websites, monitoring changing information and interacting with online services in real time.
Those developments increase demand for infrastructure capable of reliably accessing and processing current information from across the web.
That does not necessarily mean web scraping alone. Organisations obtain live data through a combination of licensed datasets, platform APIs, search services and direct web extraction. Oxylabs' products sit within that broader ecosystem, providing infrastructure that enables organisations to collect and structure publicly available online information at scale.
As demand grows, so too does scrutiny.
Large-scale extraction of publicly available web content has become the subject of increasing legal, commercial and ethical debate, particularly as AI developers seek access to ever larger volumes of online information. Questions around copyright, platform terms of service, consent and licensing continue to evolve, making compliance an increasingly important consideration for companies operating in this market.
Those debates extend well beyond any single company. They also illustrate that the infrastructure supporting AI's access to information is becoming almost as strategically important—and contested—as the models themselves.
A growing European technology ecosystem
The investment is also significant from a European perspective.
Much of the discussion surrounding AI has focused on foundation model developers in the United States or large-scale infrastructure projects led by hyperscalers. Oxylabs occupies a different layer of the technology stack, providing infrastructure that other organisations use to access and work with publicly available web data.
Its reported valuation also adds another name to Lithuania's increasingly influential technology sector.
Over the past decade, companies such as Vinted, Nord Security and Tesonet have demonstrated that globally competitive technology businesses can emerge from a country of fewer than three million people. With its first outside investment and reported $3.6 billion valuation, Oxylabs becomes another example of that broader trend.
Scaling a market that is becoming more contested
Oxylabs' decision to accelerate its expansion comes at a time when the business of collecting publicly available web data is becoming both more valuable and more contested.
As AI systems increasingly retrieve information from the live web rather than relying solely on historical training data, organisations require infrastructure capable of accessing, structuring and delivering current online information at scale. At the same time, publishers, platforms and regulators are taking a closer look at how that information is collected, who controls it and under what conditions it may be reused.
That tension now sits at the heart of a rapidly evolving market.
While companies such as Oxylabs argue that reliable access to publicly available information is becoming an essential component of modern AI systems, content owners increasingly question whether large-scale automated extraction should be treated in the same way as conventional web browsing.
The debate extends well beyond any single company.
It touches on questions of copyright, licensing, platform terms of service, technical access controls and the commercial value of content that remains publicly visible online.
Those questions have already begun reaching the courts.
Last year, Reddit filed a lawsuit against several companies, including Oxylabs, alleging that they circumvented technical measures by obtaining Reddit content through search results for commercial AI-related use. Oxylabs has disputed Reddit's interpretation of the law and said it intends to defend itself. The allegations have not been tested in court.
The case illustrates a broader issue rather than one unique to Oxylabs.
As AI systems increasingly depend on current information, the legal and commercial boundaries surrounding large-scale web data extraction are still being defined.
Building infrastructure beneath the AI stack
Those debates should not obscure what Oxylabs actually builds.
Unlike foundation model developers or consumer AI companies, Oxylabs does not create the applications most users interact with. Instead, it develops infrastructure that organisations use to access and organise publicly available online information before that information reaches downstream AI systems or analytical platforms.
That places the company in a relatively invisible—but increasingly important—part of the technology stack.
Search providers index information. Platform APIs provide controlled access to selected data. Licensed datasets offer another route. Companies such as Oxylabs provide proxy, browser automation and web extraction infrastructure that organisations can use to gather publicly available information at enterprise scale.
Those approaches are complementary rather than mutually exclusive.
Different organisations combine different sources depending on the application, the data required and the legal or contractual framework within which they operate.
For Oxylabs, the challenge is therefore not simply technological.
As the company expands internationally, it must also operate in an environment where expectations around transparency, licensing, compliance and responsible data use continue to evolve alongside the technology itself.
A milestone for Lithuania's technology sector
According to Lithuania's official business and investment agency, the transaction makes Oxylabs the country's second-highest-valued unicorn, behind Vinted. It also represents the second unicorn to emerge from the Tesonet technology ecosystem, following Nord Security.
For a country with fewer than three million inhabitants, that is a notable achievement.
Over the past decade, Lithuania has established itself as one of Europe's more productive technology ecosystems, particularly in enterprise software, cybersecurity and digital infrastructure. Rather than competing directly in the race to build foundation models, companies emerging from the country have tended to specialise in technologies that enable other organisations to build and scale digital services.
Oxylabs fits comfortably within that pattern.
Its products are unlikely to attract the public attention given to chatbots or image generators. Yet infrastructure companies rarely become strategically important because consumers recognise their names. They become important because other businesses increasingly depend on what they build.
More than another funding announcement
Warburg Pincus' investment undoubtedly marks the beginning of a new chapter for Oxylabs.
After more than a decade of organic growth, the company has chosen to partner with an institutional investor as it expands its infrastructure and international presence. How that additional capital changes the business will become clearer over the coming years.
The investment also arrives at an interesting moment for the wider AI ecosystem.
Demand for timely, structured online information continues to grow as AI systems become more capable of retrieving and acting on current data. At the same time, publishers and platforms are becoming more determined to define how that information may be accessed, licensed and commercialised.
Oxylabs sits at the intersection of those two developments.
Its reported $3.6 billion valuation places a substantial figure on infrastructure designed to make the public web more accessible to enterprise customers. The Reddit litigation, meanwhile, highlights that the rules governing access to that same web remain far from settled.
How those competing forces are ultimately reconciled may shape more than Oxylabs' future.
They may also help determine who builds—and who controls—the infrastructure through which the next generation of AI systems encounters the live web.
Further reading on MoveTheNeedle.news:
Europe's next strategic dependency may be AI itself
Is Claude becoming the AI equivalent of Windows, SAP or AWS?