Decodo.com, formerly Smartproxy: the company, its owners and its history

Decodo is the proxy company that called itself Smartproxy until April 22, 2025. Its contract names the operator as Data troops, UAB, a Vilnius company with 192 staff and 29.0 million euros of revenue in 2025. Tesonet, the Vilnius venture builder behind Oxylabs and Nord Security, lists Decodo in its own portfolio with the investment year 2024. The rest of this page is the record, oldest first, with the source of every date. Prices and the alternatives are on our Decodo review.

Decodo at a glance

We read every record on October 10, 2026, from our server in the United States: the Lithuanian register, the US and EU trademark offices, the RIPE network database, US court dockets, the Internet Archive, and Decodo's and Tesonet's own pages.

The story, oldest first

A solid marker is a record we read in a register, an archive or a public database. A hollow one is the company's own word, or its investor's.

Before Smartproxy: a name for sale

The name is older than the company. Verisign's registry dates smartproxy.com to November 9, 2003. In August 2008 the address showed an advertising page titled "proxy", with links about phones, ringtones and long-distance plans.

By February 2011 the page carried "© 2011 Marchex Sales, Inc." and the line "This domain may be for sale." In October 2016 it said: "The domain smartproxy.com is for sale. To purchase, call Afternic.com."

From September 2017 to November 2018 the archive shows an empty page. It does not show when the name changed hands, or for what price.

December 2018: a shop for Instagram and sneaker proxies

The proxy business appears in the first days of December 2018. On December 6, 2018, a GitHub organization was created. It is called Decodo today and gives Lithuania as its location.

The first archived shop page dates from February 19, 2019. Its title read "The Best Residential Proxy Network with 10M+ IPs". The products were named after what buyers used them for: Instagram proxies, sneaker proxies, and proxies for Twitter, Craigslist, Facebook and Reddit.

The prices were monthly plans. The smallest gave 5 GB for $75 a month, which is $15 a gigabyte. The largest public plan gave 100 GB for $600, or $6 a gigabyte. A refund was possible within three days.

Six years later the company described those first buyers itself. Its rename post said some began with "straightforward tasks like managing multiple social media accounts". Its About page dates the business to 2018: "Since 2018, Decodo (formerly known as Smartproxy) has been the go-to proxy and scraping solutions provider."

A contract without a company

For five years the contract did not say who was selling. The License Agreement archived on July 19, 2019, says the service "is owned and maintained by Smartproxy and its affiliated companies". The text names no registered company and no address.

The privacy policy said the same in its own way: "In all cases mentioned in this Policy Smartproxy is your personal data controller." All 20 archived versions from July 2019 to June 2021 say this, and none names a company. The affiliate terms of December 2023 and May 2024 chose the laws of England and Wales, and still named no company.

The version of the License Agreement "last updated on March 28th, 2023" kept that wording until mid-2024. The next version, "last updated on July 10th, 2024", is the first to name one: UAB "Data troops", legal entity code 305893779, Antakalnio str. 17, Vilnius. The archive holds 68 captures of that contract with differing content between July 2019 and February 2025.

A customer in those five years could not tell from the contract which company stood behind the service. Data troops itself is younger than the brand.

Data troops: the company that signs today

The Lithuanian register shows Data troops, UAB registered on September 8, 2021. It started with 2,500 euros of share capital in 100 shares, at Treniotos g. 2-12 in Vilnius. The register gives its first director only as initials. Today it shows one shareholder, a company it does not name.

Its first insured employees appear in May 2022: five on May 4, nine on May. 8 Its first revenue is in the accounts for 2022. The company moved to Antakalnio g. 17 in January 2023 and changed its director in February 2023.

The filed accounts show revenue of 7.1 million euros in 2022, 19.0 million in 2023, 21.2 million in 2024 and 29.0 million in 2025. Net profit was 0.48 million euros in 2022, a loss of 0.47 million in 2023, then 0.33 million in 2024 and 0.51 million in 2025.

Which company sold Smartproxy from December 2018 until Data troops had staff in 2022 is not in any record we found. We list it under the questions this page cannot answer.

Growth, by its own numbers

The shop page claimed "10M+ IPs" from February 2019 to March 2020. From July 2020 the title said "40M+ IPs", and that figure stayed until mid-2023. By January 2024 the claim was "55M+ real IPs" for residential traffic and "65M+" in total.

The year 2023 brought the most new products. In its own review of that year, the company wrote: "We started the year by introducing mobile proxies." ISP proxies and a scraping product called Site Unblocker followed, and SOCKS5 arrived for residential, mobile and dedicated datacenter proxies. The same post reported "over 10K new users in 2023" and 67,273 support queries.

Prices went the other way. The smallest purchase cost $15 a gigabyte from 2019 to 2021. In January 2023 a pay-as-you-go gigabyte cost $12.50. By March 2024 it cost $7, and on September 26, 2026, it cost $4.

On September 7, 2022, the brand joined a new industry group. The Internet Infrastructure Coalition announced the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative that day, and its release named five founding members: "Coresignal, Oxylabs, Smartproxy, Sprious, and Zyte." Decodo still calls itself "a co-founder of the EWDCI".

2024: an investor, a legal name and a new brand

Tesonet's own portfolio page lists decodo.com with "Investment year: 2024". The page gives no month and no stake size.

The paper trail of that year moves fast. On July 10, 2024, the contract named Data troops for the first time. Sixteen days later, on July 26, 2024, an application for the word mark DECODO reached the US Patent and Trademark Office. It was filed on an intent-to-use basis: for a name not yet in use.

On August 1, 2024, Data troops filed DECODO with the EU's trademark office and in the UK. On November 13, 2024, it filed the mark again in the EU, in a stylised form, and made it the base of an international registration the same day. By December 2024 decodo.com showed a placeholder page with one word in its title: "DECODO".

On January 30, 2025, the RIPE network database received an organization called "Data troops, UAB", with tech@smartproxy.com as its contact. On March 27, 2025, the register moved the company to Švitrigailos g. 34 in Vilnius.

The rename of April 22, 2025

Decodo's rename post went up on April 22, 2025, signed by its chief executive, Vytautas Savickas. "The transition to Decodo represents the next phase of our journey, evolving in response to the dynamic needs of our customers," he said in the press release that day. Accounts, plans and payment history moved over, and the old proxy endpoints kept working.

The post spoke of an "85K+ user base" and offered a 30% code for the month. The US trademark file records April 22, 2025, as the first use of DECODO in commerce.

Within six months the homepage claim changed more than in the four years before it. In January 2025 smartproxy.com claimed "55M+ real IPs". By July 2025 decodo.com claimed "115M+ real IPs" and 125M+ in total. No page we read explains the jump.

The old name did not stay empty. Decodo warns that "brand impersonators are operating under the Smartproxy.org name, which offers low-quality products under our former name". The registry records a transfer of smartproxy.org on June 25, 2024. On October 10, 2026, it forwarded to another site selling "SmartProxy" proxies. Decodo names smartproxy.cn as a second impostor.

Decodo today

Tesonet wrote about Decodo on November 20, 2025: "From a humble team of seven to a thriving organization of over 130 employees." The Lithuanian social insurance data shows 192 insured staff at Data troops on October 2, 2026, at an average gross salary of 4,346 euros in August 2026.

On March 25, 2026, Decodo announced a new chief executive. Vaidotas Juknys, "previously our Chief Commercial Officer", took over, and Vytautas Savickas "is moving to new ventures". The same site says Savickas "led Decodo as CEO for the better part of a decade". His new venture was next door. Oxylabs posted on the same day, March 25, 2026, that "Vytautas Savickas is becoming the CEO of Oxylabs group", while its founder, Julius Černiauskas, would become Chairman of the Board.

The trademark work finished that year. The US registered DECODO as 8171035 on March 10, 2026, and the stylised mark as 8320804 on June 30, 2026. Both list Data troops, UAB as the owner. The US file also records an ownership assignment on July 9 and 10, 2025.

Both US applications were filed by the same attorney at the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright. A docket number is the filer's own reference for a case. The one on the second application reads "OXYL.T0005US.AP1": it begins with the first four letters of Oxylabs. The file does not say why.

The trade mark index TMview shows two DECODO filings under another name. In China the mark was filed on July 23, 2024, three days before the first US filing, by DataQuake B.V.; B.V. is the Dutch form of a private company. In Brazil a filing of November 13, 2024, the day of Data troops' international registration, also names DataQuake B.V. Its number, 501838641, ends in the number of that international registration, 1838641. No record we read says who DataQuake B.V. is, or how it relates to Data troops.

The customer count grew on the company's pages from "85K+" to "135K+". On October 10, 2026, the About page carried both figures: "85K+ users around the globe" in its text, and "135K+ users" lower down.

Who Decodo is connected to

Four brands a buyer might weigh against each other, Oxylabs, Webshare, ScrapingBee and Decodo, appear in one investor's portfolio. Our Webshare company page follows the brand Oxylabs bought in 2022, and our page on who owns your proxy provider maps the whole group.

Smartproxy in court filings

Decodo has not been a party to any US case we found. Its old name appears in three sets of filings.

GeoSurf, 2020. In Luminati Networks v. BI Science, a patent case in the Eastern District of Texas (2:18-cv-00483), Luminati asked BI Science how its GeoSurf service worked. BI Science's filing of January 22, 2020, lists "servers used by GeoSurf: Packetstream, Serverloft, SmartProxy, and Serversget."

The IRL app, 2024. A SoftBank fund, SVF II Aggregator (DE) LLC, sued a co-founder of the social app IRL and four others in the Northern District of California (4:23-cv-03834-YGR). Its amended complaint of June 3, 2024, alleges that bots inflated IRL's user numbers. It says many of IRL's top addresses "were associated with particular proxy service providers, known as OxyLabs and SmartProxy", and that "IRL maintained relationships with OxyLabs and SmartProxy and had been paying them for services".

The same complaint calls card charges for "Paddle" "an alternative name to SmartProxy". The defendants answered on August 6, 2024, that this "is verifiably untrue" because "Paddle is a payment processor". Decodo's own pricing pages show the link: they name Paddle as the reseller that processes its orders. Paddle's own FAQ, quoted by the defendants, says it serves "thousands of software companies around the world".

On February 27, 2025, the judge granted the defendants' motion to dismiss in part and denied it in part. The case was sent to private mediation in April 2025, and a stay was entered on September 22, 2025. The claims are against the IRL defendants; neither Smartproxy nor Oxylabs is a party.

Bright Data's patents, 2023. In Bright Data's appeals to the Federal Circuit against Code200, UAB and others, the docketed papers record Bright Data's argument that "competitors like Oxylabs, Smartproxy, and Microleaves have praised the advantages" of the technology its patents cover.

What Decodo sells today, in short

Decodo sells residential, ISP, mobile and datacenter proxies, and scraping APIs billed per request. On September 26, 2026, one gigabyte of residential traffic cost $4 pay as you go. A 3 GB plan cost $11.25 a month, and the lowest rate was $2 a gigabyte at 1 TB a month. All prices exclude VAT.

A first purchase can be refunded within 14 days if less than 20% of the traffic, or 1 GB, has been used. Some kinds of target open only after an identity check. The full price tables, the fine print and the alternatives are on our Decodo review.

On where its addresses come from, Decodo says it works with "trusted providers, including wholesalers who acquire exit nodes from app users". It adds: "we enable users to earn money by participating in a peer-to-peer network". Users "receive earnings based on the amount of data traffic they contribute to the network, calculated in GBs." No page we read names the app.

What customers report over time

The Trustpilot score rose to 4.7 by late 2022 and held there into 2024. Since the rename it has slipped back to the 4.3 of 2021, while the number of reviews kept growing.

Is Decodo legit?

The records describe an established business. Data troops is a registered Lithuanian company that files accounts and pays social insurance for 192 people. It owns its brand in the US and the EU, and it has sold proxies under one name or the other since December 2018. The review count has grown every year we checked.

Two things are not on the record. One is which company sold Smartproxy before 2022. The other is who owns Data troops today.

If you are looking elsewhere

• If you want a provider outside the Tesonet portfolio, leave Oxylabs, Webshare and ScrapingBee off the list too. HProxy is not part of any proxy or VPN group. The Decodo review prices five other networks side by side.
• If you buy small amounts, Decodo's pay-as-you-go wallet credits can expire after twelve months without use. HProxy sells $0.50/GB for one gigabyte of Lite with no plan, and the balance never expires.
• If you want to test before you pay, our free proxy checker tests HTTP and SOCKS proxies from any provider, with no sign-up.

What we could not find out

1. Who sold Smartproxy from December 2018 to 2022. No contract version of those years names a company, and Data troops had no staff before May 2022.
2. Who owns Data troops. The free register shows one corporate shareholder without a name. Tesonet's page shows an investment year, not a stake.
3. Who filed the first DECODO application. The US file records an ownership assignment on July 9 and 10, 2025; the assignor is not on the status page.
4. Who DataQuake B.V. is. TMview names it on the DECODO filings in China and Brazil, and no register entry we could read names it.
5. What the OXYL in the second filing stands for. Only the filer can say what its docket number OXYL.T0005US.AP1 refers to.
6. Why the residential claim doubled. From 55M+ in January 2025 to 115M+ in July 2025, with no explanation on the pages we read.
7. Which app pays the peer-to-peer users that Decodo's sourcing page mentions.

We bought nothing and tested no Decodo proxy: our rule is to read and never to buy. Prices, staff numbers and claims change fast. This page is due for a new check by January 10, 2027.

Sources

• Lithuanian register via rekvizitai.vz.lt: Data troops, UAB (305893779) and Oxylabs, UAB (302166536), company data, change history, filed accounts and insured staff. Read October 10, 2026.
• Tesonet: portfolio page, and "Decodo's Next Chapter: Evolution, not revolution", November 20, 2025. Read October 10, 2026.
• Decodo: License Agreement, sourcing page, security and compliance page, About page, "Smartproxy is now Decodo" (April 22, 2025), "Decodo's New CEO: Vaidotas Juknys Takes the Lead" (March 25, 2026), "Decodo's Year in Review 2023" (January 10, 2024). Read October 10, 2026.
• Internet Archive: smartproxy.com from 2008 to 2025 (homepage, License Agreement, privacy policy, affiliate terms, residential pricing), decodo.com from 2024 to 2026, and the Trustpilot pages of both. Read October 10, 2026.
• Oxylabs, "Oxylabs Group Evolves Its Leadership Structure to Accelerate the Next Decade", March 25, 2026. Read October 10, 2026.
• US Patent and Trademark Office: DECODO, serial 98668585 (registration 8171035) and serial 99175577 (registration 8320804), status pages with the attorney records and the prosecution history. Read October 10, 2026.
• European Union Intellectual Property Office: trademark 019104894; TMview (EUIPO and national offices): every DECODO mark in every office. Read October 10, 2026.
• RIPE database: organization ORG-DTU2-RIPE. Read October 10, 2026.
• Verisign and Public Interest Registry records for smartproxy.com and smartproxy.org; GitHub organization record. Read October 10, 2026.
• Internet Infrastructure Coalition, "The i2Coalition Launches Initiative to Promote Public Data Aggregation Industry Best Practices", September 7, 2022. Read October 10, 2026.
• US courts, through CourtListener: Luminati Networks v. BI Science (E.D. Tex. 2:18-cv-00483); SVF II Aggregator (DE) LLC v. Shafi (N.D. Cal. 4:23-cv-03834-YGR), amended complaint of June 3, 2024, motion to dismiss of August 6, 2024, and the docket; Bright Data v. Code200, UAB (Fed. Cir. 23-2144 and related). Read October 10, 2026.
• Our own checks from the box: DNS and network owner of gate.decodo.com, gate.smartproxy.com and pr.oxylabs.io; the status of smartproxy.org. October 10, 2026.