Bright Data

Bright Data (formerly Luminati Networks) was founded in 2014 by Ofer Vilenski and Derry Shribman, initially emerging as a spin-off from their consumer VPN platform, Hola. The company is headquartered in Netanya, Israel. In 2017, the UK-based private equity firm EMK Capital acquired a majority stake in the company at an estimated valuation of $200 million. Operating as a private entity, the company rebranded from Luminati to Bright Data in 2021. Led by CEO Or Lenchner, the platform provides proxy infrastructure and web scraping tools heavily utilized by AI companies for model training data. A notable development in recent years has been Bright Data securing significant legal victories in US courts against social media giants like Meta and X, reinforcing the legal standing of scraping public web data.

The company operates extensive proxy networks (residential, datacenter, mobile, and ISP) alongside proprietary tools for web data extraction. Bright Data solves the engineering challenge of automated data collection at scale by bypassing anti-bot systems, rate limits, and IP blocks. Its infrastructure is purchased by security firms, e-commerce platforms, academic researchers, and AI labs needing massive public datasets for LLM training. Products are sold via both self-serve developer portals and enterprise sales contracts, utilizing usage-based pricing models—typically per-gigabyte for proxy traffic or per-API-call for scraping requests.

The historical flagship product is the proxy network, comprising millions of opt-in IP addresses globally. Adjacent to the raw infrastructure, the Web Unlocker is an automated API that handles browser fingerprinting, CAPTCHA solving, and IP rotation to guarantee successful HTTP requests. The Scraping Browser is a cloud-hosted browser designed specifically for developers to script data extraction flows bypassing complex client-side bot detection. In addition to infrastructure, Bright Data sells pre-collected, structured Datasets compiled from public domains (such as e-commerce catalogs or public social media profiles).

Bright Data competes directly with Oxylabs, Smartproxy, and Israeli competitor Alarum (NetNut). Within the proxy and data collection landscape, Bright Data operates in the premium tier, targeting enterprise and high-volume AI customers with fully compliant, enterprise-grade tools. The surge in Generative AI development has served as a massive sector tailwind, as foundation models require vast amounts of scraped web text and data points.

Bright Data is headquartered in Netanya, operating out of the Poleg Industrial Area. The Netanya office serves as the core hub for the company's R&D, product management, and executive leadership. The company typically recruits in Israel for software engineering roles, particularly Node.js and Python backend developers, data engineers, and DevOps specialists.