Oxylabs is the Source ecosystem’s foundational company and the flagship of the entire public web data access industry. An industry it helped pioneer and continues to shape. Managing and further developing what is possibly the most powerful web data access infrastructure in the world, Oxylabs continues to lead the industry’s development in technological capability, innovation, standards, and open-access advocacy.
As AI agents become the primary users of the web, Oxylabs develops the web access layer on which they depend. Its residential network of over 177M IPs across 195 countries and territories is the largest ethically sourced network in the market. World-leading enterprises and AI labs rely on Oxylabs for high-stakes, demanding projects, positioning it at the premium tier of a market it helped create. With over 15,000 such clients worldwide, Oxylabs continues to reward their trust by advancing access capabilities. Notably, its Web API now optimizes agentic access to the web, paving the way for the next chapter of agent-empowered web activity.
Investing in the future of web access
Oxylabs was established in 2015, growing out of the Tesonet accelerator in Vilnius. At the time, public web data collection was barely a category. There were no established standards, not enough shared definitions of what responsible collection looked like, and very little trust from the outside world. Building a business meant building the ground it stood on first.
We started in 2015 in a category that didn't really exist yet, which meant writing the rules as we went. A decade later, the stakes are different: the companies building AI systems need the open web to be accessible reliably, at a scale that would break most infrastructure. The environment has changed, but our mission hasn’t – it's the same job of building for access.
Marija Gecaitė, Chief Commercial Officer at Oxylabs.
While developing its infrastructure, Oxylabs invented many solutions, advancing access capabilities, and turned them into a patent portfolio that exceeds 160. Gradually cementing its market leadership and coming across many expansion opportunities, Oxylabs waited for those that made strategic sense.
Each addition to the ecosystem answered a distinct strategic need. The Webshare acquisition – likely the first time a Lithuanian-founded company bought a Silicon Valley business – proved the model: two companies operating independently, with a shared layer of core functions underneath. That layer became the ecosystem. Decodo extended its reach into the mid-market. Honeygain joined as already trusted Oxylabs' supply partner, the industry's best answer to ethical proxy sourcing and a direct advance on the ecosystem's commitment to responsible standards. ScrapingBee brought a hands-off scraping API for developers who want web data in their workflows without taking care of the scraping tasks themselves.
Each addition covers a different part of the web data lifecycle and a different kind of customer. What formed around Oxylabs was an ecosystem, and it needed its own name and identity. In 2026, it became Source.
Industry’s architect
The standards Oxylabs developed now form the basis for the Source ecosystem. Meanwhile, its work across business operations, governance, education, and beyond is foundational for the entire web data access industry.
Oxylabs co-founded the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative to help set the standard for fair and responsible data collection when there were very few guidelines or regulations. The company maintains ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification across multiple products along with SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, all verifiable via its public Trust Center.
Oxylabs hosts OxyCon, the largest annual web scraping conference, bringing together the diverse community of businesses, journalists, researchers, and developers. Through Project 4β, it provides infrastructure, technical expertise, and other support at no cost to researchers, NGOs, investigative journalists and others working to advance public interest, partnering with organizations such as Bellingcat, Pulitzer Center, and MIT.
Oxylabs was among the first to apply AI and machine learning to public web data gathering. From introducing adaptive parsing models that allow tools to adjust automatically to website changes to developing the first-ever AI copilot for web data access and a whole suite of AI-powered tools, Oxylabs was always at the forefront of the symbiotic relationship between AI and web access technology.
Most recently, it brought its access infrastructure together into Oxylabs Web API – a single, agent-ready API that lets AI applications and agents search the live web and retrieve clean, structured data through one interface, leveraging its powerful infrastructure and proprietary solutions to optimize for the shift toward agents as the main consumers of web data. Because it runs on the same infrastructure Oxylabs already uses to reach the web’s most complex corners, Web API delivers fresh results at request time rather than from a stale index, and holds up at enterprise scale.
Pushing Access Forward
Oxylabs continues to advocate for fair and open access to public web data and acts on the core belief that such an approach benefits every internet user. When an AI lab can reach the open web reliably, the search agent it builds gives better answers to the person asking the question. When access is open, an innovative company can build better price comparison tools for the shopper who then ends up with a better deal. When a newsroom or an NGO can pull the records it needs, the society is better informed and can make better collective decisions that shape its future.
In building for access, Oxylabs' role is pushing the limits of what's possible by scaling new, unprecedented capabilities or by inventing new solutions. With Oxylabs Web API, that means giving AI agents fresh, reliable, ready-to-use access to the live web at a scale beyond the capacity of most infrastructures. As a trusted partner for world-leading AI companies, Oxylabs is essential in enabling AI agents, agentic search, and other emerging and future technologies that make the vast resources of web data more accessible, searchable, and intelligible, and thus more useful to every internet user.
Oxylabs, part of the Source ecosystem.
