Zyte

Zyte is a technology company that provides tools and services for web data extraction.^[1] Founded in 2010 by Shane Evans and Pablo Hoffman, the company is headquartered in Ireland but operates as a fully remote organization with more than 250 employees worldwide.^[2]

Zyte

Company type	Private company
Industry	Data collection, Proxy Services
Founder	Shane Evans and Pablo Hoffman
Headquarters	Cork , Ireland
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Shane Evans (Founder and CEO)
Services	Web data extraction, Web scraping, Cloud hosting, Web crawling, AI scraping, Smart proxy management,
Website	www.zyte.com

History

Early history and founding

Co-founders, Evans and Hoffman, met while working on web data needs for different companies. Evans was leading a team that needed to develop a framework for web crawling which led him to write the open-source project, Scrapy.^[3] The project focused on developer productivity and accessibility through the use of Python.^[4]

In its early years, Zyte started offering services around web scraping and then developed a set of foundational tools for large-scale web scraping. These included Scrapy Cloud,^[5] a hosted platform for running crawlers, Splash,^[6] a headless browser for rendering JavaScript (2013), Portia,^[7] a visual scraping interface (2014), and Crawlera (2012),^[8] a managed rotating-proxy service later renamed Smart Proxy Manager.

Evans and Hoffman officially founded the company under the name Scrapinghub in Ireland in 2010.^[2]

In 2011, Scrapinghub became the official maintainer of the Scrapy framework followed by the launch of Scrapy Cloud, a platform-as-a-service to host and manage Scrapy spiders in the cloud. The same year, the company participated in the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Memex program, a research initiative focused on improving search technologies for open, deep, and dark-web content. During this period, the company also increased adoption of Scrapy Cloud and served as the maintainer for several open-source projects.^[9]

Growth and rebranding

In 2017, Shane Evans took over as CEO and appointed a new senior leadership team. The same year, the company's staff doubled to 100 employees.

In 2019, the company began its open beta for Zyte Automatic Extraction (now part of Zyte API), an AI-powered data extraction tool.^[10] That same year, it hosted the first Extract Summit, which became an annual industry conference taking place in locations that include Dublin, London and Austin, Texas.

In 2021, the company underwent a major rebrand and changed its name to Zyte, which was intended to reflect a strategic shift toward a broader focus on AI and a more expansive approach to web data.^[10] The same year, Zyte secured venture debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank.^[2][11][12] It won the Cork Chamber Company of the Year Awards.^[13][14] and was listed as 41 in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards.^[15] It also launched Zyte API, a unified endpoint combining unblocking, headless browsing, and structured data extraction.^[16]

Present status and consolidation

In 2023, the company launched Zyte API, its primary product that consolidated various technologies like proxies and browser rendering into a single tool for developers.^[17] The same year, Zyte co-founded the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative (EWDCI), an industry group that aims to establish ethical standards for data aggregation.^[18]

In 2024, Zyte announced the retirement of its Smart Proxy Manager for new customers, consolidating its proxy and web scraping technologies into the single Zyte API.^[19]

G2.com recognized Zyte as a Leader in the Data Extraction and Web Data Providers Software category in multiple reports across Winter 2024, Spring 2025, Summer 2025, and Fall 2025.^[20]

In 2025, Proxyway named Zyte on the top of the list for the Best Web Scraping APIs of 2025,^[21] and among the Best Web Scraping Services (2025)^[22] and featured the company in its 2025 research report In-Depth Look into Popular Proxy APIs (Web Unblockers).^[23] The same year TechRadar listed it as the among the best Scraper API (best web scraping API) of 2025.^[24] The company continued to expand its AI-powered capabilities, announcing new features for the Zyte API such as scroll control and lower costs.^[25] In September 2025, Zyte hosted the seventh-annual Extract Summit at Archer Hotel in Austin, Texas. At the event, Zyte's Chief Product Officer, Iain Lennon, announced the launch of Web Scraping Copilot for Visual Studio Code, an extension that assists developers in writing web scraping code, particularly in Scrapy projects.^[26][27]

Products

• Zyte API: Zyte API is the company's primary product, introduced in 2022 as a single endpoint for unblocking, headless browsing, and structured data extraction. It consolidates features previously offered separately, including proxy management and automated extraction.^[28]
• Zyte Data Services: Zyte operates a managed data-extraction service, often referred to as Data-as-a-Service (DaaS). This offering provides custom, large-scale web data delivery for organizations without in-house scraping teams or companies that need to augment their engineering resources, supported by Zyte's own engineering staff.^[29]
• Scrapy Cloud: Launched in 2011, Scrapy Cloud is a hosted platform for deploying and scaling web crawlers, initially based on the open-source Scrapy framework. It remains available as a managed infrastructure service.
• AI Scraping: In 2023, Zyte introduced Smart Scraping, an AI-assisted spider development feature. By 2024, AI-powered scraping was enabled by default within Zyte API, with models trained to adapt extraction logic to changing website structures.^[28]

Open source and ethical contributions

Zyte is a contributor to the open-source community as the lead maintainer of Scrapy,^[30] a web scraping framework written in Python. Scrapy was written by Evans, has been actively maintained by Zyte engineers since the beginning, and it remains a central component of the web scraping ecosystem.^[31]

In 2022, Zyte co-founded the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative (EWDCI) alongside other companies in the space. The initiative was established to create a framework and standards for responsible and transparent data collection practices online.^[18][32]

See also

• Scrapy