Oxylabs UAB raises $130 million from Warburg Pincus LLC, valued at €3.6 billion

This tech start-up sits in a category of its own.

You may never have heard of it, yet it has become a key link in Europe’s AI economy. Lithuanian start-up Oxylabs UAB has just raised $130 million from Warburg Pincus LLC. It is the company’s first external funding round and it takes its valuation to €3.6 billion - more than enough to earn it unicorn status.

Oxylabs UAB’s place in the European AI economy

Founded in 2015, the company made an early bet that now fits perfectly with the AI boom seen over the past few years. Oxylabs provides AI-focused developers with the infrastructure needed to retrieve publicly available online data.

This involves large-scale data collection that is essential for training and improving models. As Silicon Angle reports, Oxylabs now positions itself as a platform capable of handling billions of client requests per day.

Scale, IP access and anti-scraping tools

Oxylabs says it has access to 175 million IP addresses from consumer devices, and that this is done “ethically”. This makes it possible to capture huge volumes of real-time data and get around blocks placed on web pages - capabilities that AI agents rely on.

The company also offers a tool designed to bypass anti-scraping systems intended to stop this type of data collection.

Data collection under criticism

Denas Grybauskas, Oxylabs’ Director of Governance and Strategy, told Tech.eu last year:

“In reality, there are petabytes of non-personal information - such as e-commerce data - that are just as important. Datasets represent only a tiny part of what we do. We are first and foremost an infrastructure provider. Internally, we like to joke that we sell picks and shovels during the gold rush.”

Confident about what lies ahead, Oxylabs says it now has 350,000 customers worldwide and recurring revenues of €350 million per year. It plans to use the money raised to keep expanding and to improve its tools.

Even so, large-scale data collection remains heavily criticised. Many publishers have taken the initiative to pursue legal action against AI developers and the tools that enable this kind of harvesting. Oxylabs is aware of the scrutiny and seeks to present itself as an ethical provider, including by complying with European legislation - among the most comprehensive in this area.

The company is also behind “Project 4β”, which, Tech.eu notes, guarantees researchers, journalists, NGOs, universities and socially focused organisations access to public web data-collection infrastructure, along with legal and technical expertise and guidance. The aim is to ensure access to information for the public interest.