Lithuania's AI Unicorn Oxylabs Seeks to Scale with Web Data, Not Chatbots

Background

Lithuania has another unicorn, and this one makes its money by reading the internet faster than anyone else. Oxylabs, the Vilnius-based web scraping and proxy company, joined the billion-dollar club in July 2026 after taking a $130 million investment from private equity firm Warburg Pincus. The deal values the company at $3.6 billion.

History

A decade of bootstrapping, then one big check The valuation puts Oxylabs second among Lithuania's most valuable unicorns. Only Vinted, the secondhand fashion marketplace, sits higher. A unicorn, for the uninitiated, is a privately held startup valued at $1 billion or more. Oxylabs reported annual recurring revenue of approximately $350 million as of July 2026. ARR is the subscription-style income a company expects to collect over a year, the kind investors love because it tends to show up again next year.

Business

The company's reach is broad. Oxylabs says it serves more than 350,000 technical teams across 180 countries. As of October 2026, it employs over 800 people and holds between 160 and 180 patents. Advertisement

Why AI companies want what Oxylabs sells

The company specializes in web scraping, proxy networks, and data collection tools. Scraping means automatically extracting information from websites. Proxies route those requests through different IP addresses so that large-scale collection does not get blocked or throttled. The scale of that demand shows up in the plumbing. The data-processing capacity of the broader ecosystem Oxylabs belongs to has grown tenfold, and it now handles 1.5 million requests per second.

Growth and Expansion

From Tesonet offshoot to the Source group Oxylabs was founded in 2015 as part of the Tesonet ecosystem, a cluster of Lithuanian tech companies that has produced several notable businesses. It grew partly through acquisitions, buying proxy provider Webshare in 2022 and scraping API company ScrapingBee in 2025. On October 13, 2026, Oxylabs and four other firms launched under a new umbrella called the Source group. The structure brings related data businesses together under one banner. The company is led by CEO Vytautas Savickas, with Julius Żerniauskas serving as chairman.

Risks and Implications

Lithuania now counts at least five to six unicorns, depending on how you tally them. What this means The most important signal here is where the money went. Warburg Pincus did not back a flashy chatbot or a consumer AI app. It backed a company that sells data access, the picks-and-shovels layer underneath the AI gold rush. The bootstrapped history also changes the calculus. A company that grew for a decade without venture money likely retained more control and faced less pressure to chase growth at any cost. The $130 million check arrives as fuel for expansion rather than a lifeline, and the Source group launch suggests some of that expansion is already underway. There are risks worth watching. Web scraping sits in a contested zone. Website owners, publishers, and platforms have grown increasingly protective of their data as AI companies hoover it up. Any tightening of rules or norms around automated data collection could squeeze the business model that made Oxylabs valuable in the first place.