Oxylabs, Decodo, Webshare & Others Form Source.ai
The “data ecosystem” combines five companies and over 800 employees.
Adam Dubois
- Published:
Today, five major companies in the field of web data collection – Oxylabs, Decodo, Honeygain, Webshare, and ScrapingBee – announced the formation of an umbrella organization, Source.ai.
Source calls itself the “data ecosystem for the next era of data intelligence”. Collectively, it includes over 800 people who hold more than 180 patents and serve 350,000 customers in 180 countries.
According to the introductory article, forming Source ensures collective advantage, which in turn gives better access to people and lends the constituents more weight in advocating for fair access to public web data.
Source is essential for us and for internet users around the world because the questions facing the open web are bigger than any one company, and the answers will outlast all of us. AI, next-generation tech products, the decisions that shape markets and societies all depend on access to web data. The terms of this access that were clear at the dawn of the internet are now contested.
Source is reportedly structured as an ecosystem where its participants operate on their own terms, with independent people, product strategies, customers, and market presence. The mother organization provides operational backbone and allocates the necessary capital and resources.
This governance model helps us to better support our diverse businesses and ventures while continuing to ensure a unified set of high-level principles across all of them. It allows us to foster synergies between teams, encourage knowledge sharing, and create a strong foundation for sustainable, long-term growth and innovation.
Source is based in Vilnius and effectively forms an ecosystem within Tesonet’s broader ecosystem. It’s also created what is arguably the largest entity in the field of web data extraction.
We’ll be curious to see how Source’s influences will manifest in practice. For the time being, its formation officially links the participants as belonging to one overarching ecosystem.
Adam Dubois
Proxy geek and developer.