CEO Today - July 2022

THE CEO INTERVIEW www.ceotodaymagazine.com 24 You have such an interesting story to tell – how did the idea for forming this company that’s focused on collecting publicly available data come about? The company started from what may seem like a simple market need but is actually a very complex one. Back in 2014, we ran a very successful company called Hola, which is still the most popular content unlocking/ VPN service today. Major businesses approached us with a need to openly access web data on a mass scale and increase their competitive edge, which is how we were formed. As you know, the internet is the largest, most extensive database in the world; it is where everything happens in real-time. It was true in 2014, and even more so today, a company that wishes to stay on top of the market must have all the information to make the most strategic decisions. Whether that’s to measure customers’ sentiments and address their immediate needs, decide on the right pricing offers, or develop a new product, you simply cannot do them without public web data – you would get an incomplete picture that may lead you down the wrong path. Public web data allows you to know rather than implement a calculated guess, ensuring that you are advancing in the right direction to win more, whether that’s new business or customers. So then tell us, what exactly is public web data collection or scraping? I will start by saying that the domain is increasingly shifting at an accelerated pace, now more than ever. Web data collection or scraping is simply the accessing of public web data, which is basically data that you can see with your own eyes without the need to log in or sign into a site. Companies that collect this type of web data for their market research or business needs approach vast amounts of data and do so frequently, as much as several times a day. We work with 7 out of the 10 leading e-commerce sites, and I can tell you that they gather public web data sometimes more than 10 times a day. This is especially the case when it comes to their competitors’ pricing data, which basically guides them to frequently change the prices of their products so they can stay on top of this increasingly competitive market. If you had to do this kind of job, you would probably need hundreds or thousands of people sitting and gathering data manually, and that would still take them a very long time. With our automated products, which are data collection products, a job that potentially takes weeks is reduced to mere minutes – this is the beauty of scraping and how advanced it has become. Simply put, without scraping, there would be no open competition, which would mean that all consumers would end up paying more for the same services and products than they do today. “ The last couple of years have been incredibly interesting, and we’ve grown exponentially. To put it in numbers, in addition to partnering with the largest e-commerce sites, we are also working with 2 of the top 5 banks in the US. In addition, we’ve recently reached the 400-employee mark and are still growing rapidly. “ 2

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