Bright Data crosses $300 million ARR, eyes $400M by 2026 as demand for live web data grows
CEO Or Lenchner says real-time, high-quality web data has become the backbone of AI innovation, driving 50% year-over-year growth for the Israeli data company.
Bright Data has crossed $300 million in annual recurring revenue and is growing more than 50 percent year-over-year, a surge that positions the Israeli data company to reach $400 million by mid-2026, according to a new post by CEO Or Lenchner. The milestone underscores how central real-time web information has become to the global race to build more adaptive and reliable artificial intelligence systems.
In his post, Lenchner argues that the era of AI breakthroughs defined by sheer model size or compute power is ending. Instead, he says, the industry is converging around a more fundamental bottleneck: the quality and timeliness of the data that trains and grounds the models. “Fresh data has become the oxygen of AI innovation,” he writes, describing a world in which information “decays within hours,” rendering static datasets increasingly obsolete.
The company, which provides live web data feeds, continuous indexing, and large-scale agentic data pipelines, says it is "highly profitable" and that demand for this kind of infrastructure is accelerating rapidly. Bright Data now supports 14 of the top 20 global LLM labs and seven of the top 10 AI-first companies, powering more than 100 million AI-agent interactions each day. Lenchner frames the company’s business not as an ancillary service but as a prerequisite for keeping AI systems “in sync with the ever-changing web.”
This shift, he says, is pushing companies to build proprietary knowledge bases and retrieval systems that require vast quantities of up-to-date information. “Differentiated intelligence comes not just from better algorithms, but from access to richer, more relevant, and constantly updated information,” Lenchner writes.
The company added that it now operates the third-largest repository of cached web pages, behind only the Internet Archive and Google, and describes itself as the second-largest web data company globally, again trailing only Google.
Bright Data’s post comes after last year federal courts tossed out separate complaints from Meta and X, both of which had accused the company of improperly harvesting data from their sites. Those decisions effectively clarified a long-murky issue: information that can be viewed without logging into a service qualifies as public, and collecting it falls within the law. The litigation also surfaced an irony that drew widespread attention. While publicly challenging Bright Data’s practices, Meta and X were simultaneously paying customers of the company.
