Bright Data

Bright Data (previously as Luminati Networks), is a global technology company that offers web data collection and proxy services to B2B companies. Since 2018, the CEO of Bright Data is Or Lenchner.

History
The company was founded under the name Luminati Networks as a division of the Hola VPN company in 2014. In 2017, Luminati Networks was sold separately from Hola to EMK Capital, a private investment fund from London, at a value of approximately 200 million dollars. In March 2021, Luminati Networks was renamed to Bright Data.

In May 2021, Bright Data founded an organization called The Bright Initiative with the aim of making data available at no cost to non-profits, organizations and research bodies. The organization serves more than 700 companies, including 300 academic institutions.

In September 2022, the company acquired the Israeli start-up Market Beyond, which works in the analysis of e-commerce data based on artificial intelligence.

In June 2023, Bright Data joined the Amazon Web Services ISV Accelerate program.

In July, X Corp, formerly known as Twitter, sued Bright Data for scraping data from Twitter, violating its terms of service. This followed a similar lawsuit by Meta Platforms against Bright Data for data harvesting from Facebook and Instagram in January of the same year. Bright Data countersued, asserting its commitment to making public data accessible, claiming legality in its web data collection practices.

In January 2024, Bright Data won a legal dispute with Meta. A federal judge in San Francisco declared that Bright Data did not breach Meta's terms of use by scraping data from Facebook and Instagram, consequently denying Meta's request for summary judgment on claims of contract breach. This court decision in favor of Bright Data’s data scraping approach marks a significant moment in the ongoing debate over public access to web data, reinforcing the freedom of access to public web data for anyone.

At the same time, Bright Data, in collaboration with the Molly Rose Foundation charity, released a research report titled "Preventable yet Pervasive: The Prevalence and Characteristics of Harmful Content, Including Suicide and Self-Harm Material, on Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest." This study provided insights into the extent and nature of harmful content on these social media platforms.

In May 2024, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by X Corp. (formerly Twitter) against Bright Data, ruling that the company did not violate X's terms of service or copyright by scraping publicly accessible data. The judge emphasized that such scraping practices are generally legal and that restricting them could lead to information monopolies, and highlighted that X's concerns were more about financial compensation than protecting user privacy.

In May 2024, Bright Data received The Best Platform for Proxies award from Proxyway, an independent proxy server industry researcher.