Proxycurl Shuts Down. Thank you.

In January earlier this year (2025), LinkedIn filed a lawsuit against Proxycurl. Today, we are shutting Proxycurl down. Regardless of the merits of LinkedIn's lawsuit, there is no winning in fighting this. This is due to two reasons:

• The American Rule, which means that even if we were to win the lawsuit, we would not be able to claim legal fees.
• LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, has more or less an unlimited war chest.

If I were sappy and any less of an optimist than I am, I'd be dismissive of the fact that LinkedIn had to resort to lawfare to shut us down. Instead, I have now learned a lesson: if I were to build a great and big business, lawfare had better be one of the weapons in my arsenal. And I had better build a business big and fast, so that LinkedIn (or any other huge incumbent competitor) would think twice before suing me, especially if a harmful legal precedent might be made against a defendant with means (like Apollo).

This is my biggest mistake with Proxycurl—that I chose to grow it organically.

This is not a sudden closure. Over the past few weeks/months, I have been assisting our existing customers with deboarding Proxycurl as best as I can. If you are an existing customer, please reach out to [email protected] and we'll see how I can assist you further.

I built Proxycurl around two core principles:

• Giving a fuck about the customer. I'm not sure if it shows, but I made sure that all support emails were replied to properly, within a reasonable time. I also made sure to read all emails, whether sent by our sales reps or our customer support reps. Most, if not all, emails that involved customers had me CC-ed.
• A product for developers, by developers. This meant backward compatibility, great documentation, clear and transparent pricing, great API error messages, and most importantly, uptime.

I think this is how we were able to grow Proxycurl to a ~$10M revenue business before we had to shut it down to comply with the legal settlement with LinkedIn.

All good things come to an end. I have to be honest, this is refreshing. I haven't had a break since I graduated from university some 12 years ago. I continue to retain my work email and this domain.

Thank you for your support and for giving Proxycurl a chance. I did my best, and this will not be the last you hear from me. I continue to be of service to you. If there is anything I can do to help, feel free to send an email to [email protected].