ScrapingBee
From failed side projects to an 8-figure exit — the web scraping API that SEO built
www.scrapingbee.comAnnual Revenue
$5M
MRR
~$417K (at time of acquisition)
Team
6 employees at time of acquisition
Funding
Bootstrapped + Pre-seed
Founder
Pierre de Wulf & Kevin Sahin
Co-Founders
Failed twice before ScrapingBee — ShopToList (2017) and PricingBot (2018) both taught hard lessons about B2C vs B2B economics
What ScrapingBee Does
ScrapingBee is a web scraping API that handles all the complex infrastructure developers need to extract data from websites at scale. Instead of managing headless browsers, proxy rotation, CAPTCHAs, and anti-bot detection themselves, developers make simple REST API calls and ScrapingBee handles the rest. The product was built in just 3 weeks leveraging Kevin's 5+ years of deep domain expertise building large-scale scrapers in fintech. Originally launched as 'ScrapingNinja', they were forced to rebrand after a trademark dispute. What makes ScrapingBee's story remarkable is their growth engine: 99% of revenue came from SEO and content marketing, with only 3-4 blog posts per month — but each post took ~30 hours to produce and aimed to be the definitive resource on its topic. This 'skyscraper technique' made them the second-largest web scraping blog on the internet. In June 2025, they were acquired by Oxylabs Group for an eight-figure all-cash deal at $5M ARR with just 6 employees — a ~$833K revenue-per-employee ratio.
Revenue Highlights
- Acquired by Oxylabs for ~$11.5M (eight-figure all-cash deal)
- Hit $1M ARR in November 2021 — just 2 years after launch
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