Oxylabs Hits $3.6B Valuation as Bootstrapped Infrastructure Giant Takes First-Ever VC

The global private $1 Billion "Unicorn Club" is rewarding deep infrastructure tools that successfully scale for years without relying on traditional venture capital hype. Defying standard VC trends, Vilnius-based web data collection and proxy infrastructure giant Oxylabs has raised its first-ever external investment, securing a spectacular $130 million funding round led by Warburg Pincus at a valuation of $3.6 billion .

This marks the first outside dollar Oxylabs has accepted since its founding in 2015, highlighting that the highest-valued private software companies of 2026 are those built on highly sustainable, independent operational revenue models rather than speculative capital cycles. The company confirmed an annual run rate of $350 million and serves more than 350,000 customers, including several Fortune 500 companies . The valuation makes Oxylabs Lithuania's second most valuable private company, behind Vinted ($5.6 billion) and ahead of Nord Security ($3 billion), and the sixth unicorn to emerge from the country .

Oxylabs provides web data scraping and proxy infrastructure that enables businesses to collect publicly available internet data at scale, bypassing IP blocks, CAPTCHAs, and geo-restrictions. Its technology is essential for AI model training, agentic AI applications, e-commerce monitoring, cybersecurity, and financial analytics. The company holds 160 patents, with 50 registered in the past year alone .

CEO Vytautas Savickas framed the investment in the context of the AI era: "The investment from Warburg Pincus will enable us to grow even faster, strengthen product development and continue implementing our long-term strategy" . The company will use the funding to strengthen its market position, accelerate next-generation product development, and pursue strategic acquisitions.

In a parallel development, India has minted two AI unicorns within a month. Emergent, a Bengaluru-based "vibe coding" platform that lets non-technical users build applications using natural language prompts, raised $130 million in a Series C round led by Creaegis at a $1.5 billion valuation, achieving unicorn status less than a year after its public launch . The company has reached a $120 million annualized revenue run-rate, with over 12 million applications built on its network and 200,000 paying customers—70% of whom have no prior coding experience . Just a month earlier, Sarvam AI raised $234 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, becoming India's first full-stack sovereign AI unicorn .

July 2026 marks a definitive shift in the unicorn landscape. Bootstrapped infrastructure companies like Oxylabs—built on sustainable revenue models and serving the AI economy—are now attracting institutional capital at scale. Meanwhile, India's rapid-fire emergence of two AI unicorns within a month signals that the country is finally entering the AI race, albeit through application-layer innovation rather than foundational models . The era of VC-fueled paper valuations is fading. The era of revenue-driven, infrastructure-focused unicorns is already here.