Proxycurl Shuts Down. Thank you.

In January earlier this year (2025), LinkedIn filed a lawsuit against Proxycurl. Today, we are shutting Proxycurl down. The team is now focused on NinjaPear, a customer support helpdesk that gives you 42 lookalike B2B prospects for every new chat. 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].