Ping Proxies is now Byteful, as we build the leading ethical proxy infrastructure for web scraping, large-scale data collection, and agentic AI.
Why Byteful
What started as a small, bootstrapped startup has grown into a platform trusted by thousands of businesses and developers around the world. As we’ve scaled, our name started to feel too small for what we’re building.
While proxies will always remain at the core of our business, it’s no longer just about proxies. It's about the tooling and layers around them: control, observability, and security. Our new identity represents our ambition to build the leading infrastructure platform for both startups and enterprises building with web data, automation, and agentic AI at scale.
So… why Byteful? Last year alone, more than thirty-one quadrillion bytes flowed through our network. The name kind of picked itself.
Our Journey
Byteful, formerly Ping Proxies, was founded while I was studying at University of Leeds just over five years ago. The university’s Spark program supported the initial idea through their Enterprise Scholarship and Business Plan competition.
In the early days, we operated as a one-man side project, with a website and dashboard hacked together before the vibe-coding era and customers predominantly in the sneaker-reselling niche. It was fun but by 2023, the sneaker-reselling gold rush was over and we had a choice…pack up or pick up. We decided on the latter, moved to Manchester and got serious.
We formed a small but mighty team and got to work. The goal was to build the next iteration of the company, not an incremental upgrade. A modern, API-first platform that would appeal to all proxy use-cases.
We went fully greenfield and with a new website, dashboard, REST API and even our own Rust-based proxy server which ran alongside a Go controller for managing routing decisions and gave us far more flexibility at the edge. Bye, bye Squid Cache. You served us well.
This stack allows us to operate at a much faster pace and lower-level. Ideas could go from dashboard buttons to network decisions in hours, not weeks. Features like Smartpath wouldn’t have been possible before.
We launched the new platform in October 2024, customers loved it, and our growth accelerated quickly. Along the way we’ve continued to ship, releasing new features, improvements and products every month since.
Today, we serve more than 1,500 active customers, process over 20 billion requests monthly and have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly recurring revenue. This growth shows no signs of slowing. Over the last quarter, signups grew 91.63% and MRR increased by 24% compared to Q4 2025.
We’re now at an inflection point and we’re doubling down. This rebrand marks our commitment to building a faster, more capable platform for web data, automation, and agentic AI. This isn’t just talk, we’re expanding our team, doubling our office space, and continuing to invest heavily in product and infrastructure so we can keep shipping faster.
What has changed?
We’re transitioning the primary domain to byteful.com and all applications will be unified under the Byteful brand. We’ve also overhauled our platform with a redesigned user interface featuring improved proxy analytics, network observability, and team access features for enterprise customers. It is also just a lot prettier to look at in general.
Existing customers will continue to be fully supported without disruption, with infrastructure remaining accessible via residential.pingproxies.com and api.pingproxies.com during the transition.
What’s Next for Byteful
We’re going to be shipping faster and with more thought than ever thanks to our new team members. The platform will have new tooling for developers and AI companies, including extending API-first proxy management, TCP/IP fingerprinting technologies, and infrastructure designed specifically for agentic AI.
With new carrier partnerships, additional product lines, and a startup program launching later this year, we’re doubling down on building the infrastructure behind companies operating on the open web.
