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4 months ago
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Proxycurl, the fast-growing data enrichment API known for transforming LinkedIn profiles into structured datasets, has abruptly shut down after LinkedIn and its parent company, Microsoft, filed a sweeping lawsuit. The case, announced in January 2025, alleged that Proxycurl operated “hundreds of thousands” of fake accounts to collect personal and professional information on millions of users. While the company insisted it only scraped publicly available data, the legal risk proved insurmountable. By the time its closed shop, Proxycurl had amassed an impressive $10 million in annual recurring revenue, a figure that made it one of the most commercially successful scrapers in the sector—and, in the end, a prime target.
Proxycurl’s closure underscores a reality that many web-scraping companies have learned the hard way: even when operating in what courts have sometimes affirmed as a legal gray zone, the threat of litigation from deep-pocketed incumbents can be existential. The American legal system’s “loser pays their own costs” structure all but guarantees that even a strong defense becomes financially ruinous for smaller firms without substantial reserves or venture backing. Proxycurl’s founder, Steven Goh, was candid in a final post, explaining that the company had grown organically, without VC funding, and simply could not weather the prolonged pressure of defending itself against a multi-billion dollar corporation intent on making an example of it.
Is it illegal to scrape Linkedin?
Yet Proxycurl is hardly alone in this fight. The past decade has seen a steady stream of high-profile legal battles over the right to scrape publicly accessible data. One of the most closely watched cases was hiQ Labs vs. LinkedIn, in which courts repeatedly sided with the scraper, concluding that collecting public profiles did not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In parallel, Bright Data—formerly known as Luminati—has faced similar suits from Meta and X Corp (Twitter), where StartupHub.ai has been a leader in coverage. Unlike Proxycurl, Bright Data survived both challenges, emerging with court decisions that effectively reinforced the legality of scraping non-logged-in, public information. In fact, earlier this year, a federal judge ruled decisively in Bright Data’s favor against Meta, throwing out contract-based claims and reaffirming that public data remains public, even when a platform’s terms of service say otherwise.
The difference between survival and collapse often comes down to operational choices and financial backing. Bright Data has been careful to emphasize that its infrastructure scrapes only what is publicly visible without authentication, while Proxycurl’s system, according to the lawsuit, relied on fake accounts that simulated logged-in behavior. That distinction—public versus private access—has become the bright line in legal precedent. Courts have generally upheld the right to collect public data but have shown far less tolerance for circumventing login barriers or impersonating users.
More broadly, the Proxycurl saga highlights the tensions at the heart of the modern data economy. On one side are platforms like LinkedIn, which have built powerful businesses on exclusive access to user data and see scraping as both a competitive threat and a privacy risk. On the other are the scrapers themselves—startups and data brokers who argue that public information, by definition, belongs in the public domain. Between them lies a patchwork of precedents and unsettled questions about privacy, property, and the limits of contractual control over what’s effectively published on the open internet.
For Proxycurl’s thousands of customers, the shutdown leaves a gap in the market and raises difficult questions about continuity. Some are already evaluating alternatives like People Data Labs, Apollo, and Bright Data—providers with stronger legal track records and the capital to endure protracted disputes. But even for these survivors, the message is clear: growth alone doesn’t guarantee security. In the end, compliance, legal defensibility, and the ability to absorb a fight may matter as much as any technical edge.
If Proxycurl’s rise to $10 million in ARR proved that demand for enrichment tools is real and massive, its fall is a sobering reminder that in the world of data scraping, the rules are just unwritten. And the price of testing them can be terminal.
