A Chat with Or Lenchner, CEO at Web Data Platform: Bright Data

Bright Data is the market-leading web data platform that makes public web data accessible to all. Founded in 2014, the company today includes over 350 employees who are spread globally and has recently opened three new offices in New York City, San Francisco as well as in New Delhi. As the market leader in the web data collection space, the company serves over 15,000 customers, ranging from Fortune 500 players to large enterprises, SMEs, strategic start-ups as well as major academic institutions, non-profits and public sector bodies.

The web data domain is, for a lack of better words, exploding. Companies, organisations and businesses today realise that in order to really know what is happening in their market space, industry or research domain, they must gather reliable web data to get the full picture. There is no other data source that can provide as comprehensive a picture as web data.

This is the reason behind Bright Data’s success to date. In fact, the company recently announced that it surpassed the 100 million USD mark in revenues and has acquired three new companies from its own revenues.

Bright Data understands that committing to reliable data starts with a commitment to the highest standards of compliance and ethics. During the years, the company has more than doubled its compliance department as well as recently nominated a new Compliance and Ethics Vice President who arrived from KPMG, a company well known for its high ethical standards. Bright Data takes pride in its unprecedented, comprehensive industry-first compliance processes and guidelines that ensure that the web data you receive is not only of the highest possible quality but is data you can trust and that you can base your most critical decisions on.

Today, the company serves organisations from almost every sector. Whether it is finance, e-commerce, travel, security, or healthcare, among others, Bright Data makes it its business to gather and deliver the data in the most efficient way through a product suite that also speaks to the non-coders of the community as well as to the data and tech professionals. Moreover, the company also anticipates the data cycles of the future with tech innovation and creativity. For example, Bright Data recently launched three more automated services and products that reduce web data collection, even the most comprehensive and large-scale, to mere minutes.

Eighteen months ago, the company also established a pro-bono organisation with the sole goal of driving positive change in the world by using public web data. Today, The Bright Initiative is home to over 350 partner organisations that either use Bright Data’s products and services pro bono, participate in the Initiative’s multiple expert-led sessions, or receive support and advice based on the company’s extensive expertise.

Among the Initiative’s partners, you will find over 140 leading universities as well as multiple non-profits that are advancing valuable environmental and social causes. The Initiative also supports the UK’s National Data Strategy (NDS) and is an active member in the NDS forum.

Organisations interested in hearing more about the Initiative or joining it should go to: https://brightinitiative.com/
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
The internet is the largest database in the world. However, the internet is not a transparent source of information. For competition-driven reasons, companies wanting to access the public web to check their competitors’ offers or product prices will simply get blocked. For this reason, organisations intending to remain relevant in this ever-evolving market need access to web data, and lots of it.

Just imagine what it would mean for us as consumers if brands wouldn’t properly compete. Furthermore, how would researchers track the advances of the pandemic without access to reliable real-time data? What would such a lack of public web data mean for tech innovation?

This is why we came up with the idea of our public web data collection platform and the entire background for establishing Bright Data.
 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
As the pandemic developed it became obvious that the number of traditional data sources organisations used to rely on rapidly decreased. These organisations, even the most reluctant ones, like finance industry companies, were looking for external data sources, web data included, to cope with what has become probably one of the most volatile periods in history.

The unpredictability that became our reality meant that the ‘wave by wave’ market translated into companies consuming more web data to guide their every step during this critical time. With the fact that online pollution has suddenly increased by close to 40%, it made even more sense to tap into the public internet on a near-live basis for actionable data.

In terms of actual numbers, Bright Data has expanded with a new office in New York and more than doubled its employee size.
 

What can we hope to see from Bright Data in the future?

 
With the data domain showing no signs of slowing down, our economy and technology increasingly relying on it, Bright Data will continue to address these growing data needs even more extensively.

The company that took its first steps in the data domain by building a public web data network and then advanced to introducing industry-leading automated data collection tools will continue to lead this market space with speed, flexibility and efficiency. Bright Data will also continue to meet the industry’s most innovative data needs with a full suite of data products and solutions that tackle the full data cycle requirements.