Oxylabs, a Lithuanian web scraping and proxy company, closed its first ever funding round on July 9: $130 million. It landed in the middle of a federal lawsuit accusing the company of helping strip-mine Reddit’s data at industrial scale. The two facts sit awkwardly next to each other, and they open a door into an ownership structure that touches one of the biggest names in consumer VPNs.
To be clear from the start: NordVPN is not a defendant in this case. Oxylabs is. But the same Lithuanian tech group that helped start Oxylabs also has deep governance ties to Nord Security, NordVPN’s parent company. That link is worth understanding, without exaggerating what it means.
The funding round
SiliconANGLE reported the $130 million raise on July 9, 2026, calling it Oxylabs’ first outside funding round since the company was founded. Oxylabs sells proxy infrastructure and web scraping tools, the kind of plumbing that lets other businesses pull large volumes of data from the public web without getting blocked. That business has boomed alongside the AI industry, since large language models need enormous amounts of scraped text to train on, and proxy networks are one of the ways companies get around rate limits and blocks while collecting it.
The timing is what makes the round notable. Oxylabs raised this money while still a named defendant in a lawsuit that could reshape how scraping companies operate, or at minimum cost them heavily in damages and legal fees. Investors backing a $130 million round for a first-time raise are betting that demand for scraped web data will keep growing regardless of how the Reddit case turns out, and that the legal risk is a cost of doing business rather than an existential threat.
What Reddit is actually alleging
On October 22, 2025, Reddit filed suit in the Southern District of New York against four companies: Perplexity AI, the AI search engine, and three web data providers, Oxylabs, SerpApi, and AWMProxy. Reddit’s claim is that all four worked together to scrape Reddit’s content off Google’s search results pages at industrial scale, and that Perplexity used the harvested data to train and run its AI products.
The numbers in the complaint are large. Reddit alleges that in a two week span in July 2025 alone, the defendants scraped more than 3 billion Google search result pages containing Reddit text, images, video, and URLs. Reddit’s language in the filing is unusually sharp: it compares the three data companies to “bank robbers hitting an armored car,” and describes Perplexity as behaving like a “North Korean hacker” that hired them to steal its “manna from heaven.” Those are quotes from the complaint itself, not paraphrasing.
Reddit’s legal claims include violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, unfair competition, unjust enrichment, and civil conspiracy. It’s asking the court to stop the scraping, block resale of the harvested data, and award damages.
Oxylabs, through representative Denas Grybauskas, has said the company was shocked and disappointed by the suit, and that Reddit never reached out directly to raise concerns before filing. Oxylabs’ position is that it provides infrastructure for compliant access to publicly available information, and that it requires every client to use its services legally. Perplexity responded on Reddit itself, calling the lawsuit “a sad example of what happens when public data becomes an important part of a public company’s business model,” and suggesting it’s a show of force in Reddit’s separate data negotiations with Google and OpenAI. The case is ongoing. Nothing has been decided by a court.
Where NordVPN fits in
This is the part that needs care, because it’s easy to overstate. NordVPN is not named in Reddit’s lawsuit, is not accused of scraping anything, and Oxylabs is a legally separate company from Nord Security, NordVPN’s parent.
What connects them is a shared piece of history. Tesonet, a Lithuanian technology company, has a documented track record of helping launch and hold stakes in a cluster of tech businesses, and Oxylabs is one of them. Nord Security also grew out of that same Lithuanian tech ecosystem, and public reporting has repeatedly pointed to overlapping executives and shared leadership history between Tesonet and Nord Security going back years. We covered this broader pattern in our piece on who actually owns your VPN: a lot of the biggest consumer VPN brands trace back to a small number of holding structures, and Nord Security’s Lithuanian roots are part of that map.
None of this makes NordVPN a party to the Reddit case, and none of it means NordVPN scrapes anyone’s data. It means that if you zoom out on the Lithuanian tech scene that produced NordVPN, you’ll find some of the same people and the same corporate DNA behind Oxylabs. That’s a governance link, not a legal one, and treating it as proof of anything more would be getting ahead of the facts.
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Why this matters if you don’t work in web scraping
Most people reading this have never heard of Oxylabs and never will interact with it directly. So why should a VPN reader care?
Because the Reddit lawsuit is really about who gets to profit from data that flows across the open internet, and proxy and VPN companies both sit in that pipeline, just doing different jobs. A proxy network like Oxylabs routes scraping traffic through residential and datacenter IPs so scrapers look like ordinary users. A consumer VPN routes your personal browsing through an encrypted tunnel so nobody, including your ISP, can see what you’re doing. They’re built on overlapping technical infrastructure, but the purpose is close to opposite: one exists to extract data at scale, the other exists to protect an individual’s data from being extracted.
The overlap in Lithuanian ownership is a reminder that the VPN industry doesn’t operate in its own bubble. The same holding companies, investors, and founders show up across proxy services, ad tech, cybersecurity tools, and consumer privacy products. Knowing who’s behind a brand doesn’t tell you whether the product is good or bad, but it’s useful context, especially when a company connected to your VPN’s corporate family is fighting a major AI-era data lawsuit in federal court.
If the case against Oxylabs succeeds, it could set new limits on how scraping companies are allowed to operate, which would ripple through the entire data broker and AI training industry. If it fails, or settles quietly, scraping at this scale likely continues as before. Either way, it’s a fight over data rights that’s bigger than any single company involved, including Oxylabs, Perplexity, or the various players tied to Tesonet.
It also shows how much money is chasing this specific corner of the internet economy right now. A company whose entire product is built around collecting other people’s public data, at a scale large enough to draw a federal lawsuit from one of the biggest platforms online, just convinced investors to hand over $130 million anyway. That tells you something about where AI-era money is flowing, even when the legal ground under it is still unsettled.
What to actually do with this information
If you use NordVPN or are considering it, this lawsuit changes nothing about the product itself. NordVPN’s no-logs claims have been through six independent audits, and none of them are connected to this case in any way. We cover that track record in our full NordVPN review.
If you’re the type of reader who cares about corporate ownership before picking a privacy tool, and you should be, this is a good moment to look at the fuller picture of who owns what in the VPN space, since Nord Security’s Lithuanian roots are far from the only example of consolidation worth knowing about.
Oxylabs is the one in court, not NordVPN, and that distinction matters legally. But the shared Lithuanian roots between Tesonet, Oxylabs, and Nord Security are real and documented, and they're a useful reminder that VPN companies don't exist in isolation from the wider data industry. Watch how the Reddit case plays out, since it could set precedent for scraping at scale, but don't confuse a governance link with an accusation. NordVPN's product and its audit history stand on their own.
Sources: Proxyway on the Reddit lawsuit | SiliconANGLE on the funding round