Webshare.io: the company, its owners and its history

Webshare is a proxy seller that went online in 2017 as a free proxy site. Its contract names Webshare Software, Company, a Delaware corporation that registered in California on 1 February 2019. All nine of its granted patents name a single inventor, the founder Asim Utku Zihnioglu. Oxylabs, the proxy company from Vilnius, announced on 20 September 2022 that it had bought Webshare. Its law firm wrote that the price, according to Oxylabs, exceeded 50 million dollars. What follows is the record, oldest first. Prices and alternatives are on our Webshare review.

Webshare at a glance

We read every record on 10 October 2026 from our server. They include the Delaware and California registers, read through OpenCorporates, the US and EU trade mark offices and the TMview index. We also read the patent files, the ARIN and RIPE network registries and US court dockets. Everything else came from the Internet Archive and from the pages of Webshare, Oxylabs, Tesonet and the deal's advisers.

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 owner's or investor's.

2017: free proxies under a name with no company

By the registry's record, webshare.io dates from 10 January 2017. Certificates for the domain and for two hosts called gateway and flower were issued the next day. Over the spring, hosts named proxycore, proxyfinder, proxyauth and proxygateway followed, and proxy.webshare.io got its first certificate on 29 July 2017.

In its trade mark filings of 2021, the company swore to a first use of the name on 22 August 2017. Ten days later, on 1 September 2017, the archive caught the first page. That page was titled "Webshare | Free Proxy". It promised "Up to 1,000 free proxy every week" and 10 GB of free traffic each month, with shared traffic beyond that at 0.05 dollars a gigabyte.

A second card offered residential proxies, and the page carried a notice: "Coming Soon. We are currently working on this feature." The footer read "© 2017 Webshare Proxy". No company appears anywhere on the page.

2018 to 2020: one shared pool, sold by threads

By February 2018 the free traffic had shrunk to 1 GB a month, and the page offered "1,000s of proxies for free". One proxy on its own cost one dollar. By July 2018 the title read "Cheap Shared Proxy | 5,000+ Proxies for $3.99".

April 2019's price list shows the model. Every plan opened the same shared pool of "5,000+ Proxies". Plans differed in parallel connections, with rotation, country filters and faster support on the dearer ones. Free users got 100, Starter buyers 500 from 4 dollars a month, Standard 1,000 from 15 dollars, and Professional 2,000 from 80 dollars.

In 2019 the site also kept landing pages named after what buyers did. They covered sneaker bots for Adidas and Footsite, Ticketmaster, Instagram, Pokemon Go and a row of SEO tools. Countries on the homepage went from "40+" in February 2018 to "50+" later that year, then to "20+" in July 2019. January 2020 brought the title "10,000+ Proxies", and the free plan gave "Over one hundred free proxies".

Late 2018: Webshare Software, Company appears

A privacy policy holds the first company name we found. Its archived copy carries "Effective date: December 25, 2018" and says that "Webshare Software, Company" operates proxy.webshare.io.

California's register shows the company's registration there on 1 February 2019 as a "Stock Corporation - Out of State". Its home is Delaware, under company number 7176968, with Gust Delaware as registered agent. In California the company gave a head office in San Mateo and filed statements in February 2019, December 2019 and March 2020.

That record lists Asim Utku Zihnioglu as chief executive officer, chief financial officer, secretary and director, each from 1 February 2019. An About page of August 2020 called it "founded in late 2018" and "already serving over 1,000 customers". Oxylabs later gave 2019 as the year Zihnioglu established Webshare.

The founder's first company

Zihnioglu came to proxies from mobile security. A US patent with a 2013 priority date, "Data exfiltration prevention from mobile platforms", lists him among four inventors. Remotium, Inc. of California was its first owner.

On 8 July 2015 Avast announced that it had acquired Remotium, whose team was "headquartered in San Mateo". Patent records show the end of that line: Remotium merged into Avast Software, Inc. with effect from 31 January 2023, and Avast Software, Inc. into Gen Digital Inc. the next day.

Webshare's About page refers to that past. It says: "Our founders have successfully founded cyber-security companies which partnered with Fortune 100 and major USA defense contractors." The 2022 announcement of the sale names Remotium and Avast directly.

2020 to 2022: patents, trade marks and a new contract

In 2020 a marketing site went up at www.webshare.io. Its first certificate is dated 18 February 2020, and the archive holds it from 12 August 2020. Every homepage in the archive since then offers 10 free proxies and 1 GB of traffic a month; the 2020 page called it a "permanent free plan".

Patent work began on 14 October 2020 with "Endpoint bypass in a proxy network". Applications on fallback from IPv6 to IPv4, on TCP fingerprints, on preemptive TCP connections, on direct connections and on latency followed until August 2022. Each lists one inventor, Zihnioglu, who assigned it to Webshare Software Company.

Source: the patent records (USPTO and EPO data through Google Patents), read 10 October 2026. Eight of the nine rest on applications made before the sale was announced; the ninth continues one of them. Lithuanian validations of both European patents also appear in the patent data.

Spring 2021 brought a change of law in the contract. The terms archived on 3 March 2021 were "governed ... in accordance with the laws of Delaware"; the copy of 17 May 2021 chose California. In May 2021 the company filed WEBSHARE and WEBSHARE PROXY in the United States. Filings in the EU and the UK followed on 15 October 2021, and in Israel five days later.

ARIN, the registry for North American networks, received an organisation called "Webshare Software, Company" on 14 January 2022, at the Walnut mailbox. For its network contact it gives a webshare.io address. No address block or network number is listed under it.

On 11 August 2022 the archive caught two new documents. By then the terms had grown from about 18,000 characters to about 42,000, now with individual arbitration, a class-action waiver and a copyright agent called "Webshare, Inc.". A new privacy policy allowed sharing data with companies "under common ownership with Webshare ... or our ultimate holding company", and named Stripe as the payment processor. Forty days later the sale was announced.

20 September 2022: Oxylabs buys Webshare

Oxylabs announced the deal from Vilnius and San Francisco on 20 September 2022. It described Webshare Software Company as a self-service proxy company with "over 10,000 active customers". It kept the details "undisclosed" and said the deal was "financed through Oxylabs cash reserves". Webshare, it wrote, would "continue to operate as an independent entity".

Norton Rose Fulbright led the deal, the release said, with support from Sorainen in the Baltic states. Sorainen's own deal note is the only public source for a price. It reads: "The exact amount of the transaction is undisclosed, but according to Oxylabs, it exceeds USD 50 million." Its partner on the deal called it "likely the first case when a Lithuania-based business has acquired a Silicon Valley company".

Webshare, the seller, had its own adviser. Corum Group of Seattle said it had worked for Webshare and "conducted a global search for the right partner". Zihnioglu added that Corum "worked very closely with Webshare while we were searching for M&A opportunities".

To its customers, Webshare wrote that it now served "over 15,000 customers" and that prices would not change. Residential proxies, it said, would come "in the upcoming weeks". Zihnioglu called Oxylabs "a brotherly company". In the 2022 release Julius Černiauskas speaks as "CEO of Oxylabs"; the same quote on Oxylabs' site today names him "Chairman of the Board at Oxylabs".

After the sale: patents, residential traffic, lower prices

Within weeks the patent files changed. On 14 October 2022 a "corrective assignment" fixed the owner's address on the first US application. On 18 November 2022 address records reached at least four more files. Webshare Software Company stayed the owner; the records we could read do not show the new address.

Seven US patents were granted from December 2022 to March 2026, and the two European ones in February 2025 and April 2026. Webshare's own intellectual-property page lists seven of the nine. Missing are US 11,522,826, granted in December 2022, and US 12,587,586, granted on 24 March 2026.

Residential proxies arrived about eight months after the sale. The homepage of 9 May 2023 has none; the one of 1 June 2023 shows "Starting at $4.80/GB". By July 2023 a banner read "New! $7.00/1GB Residential Proxy is Available". Back in 2017 the page had called the product "Coming Soon".

Archived price lists date the cut. In January 2025 one gigabyte still cost 7 dollars, with no discount shown. By July 2025 it cost 3.50 dollars beside a struck-through 7 dollars, and the largest plan fell from 4.50 to 1.40 dollars a gigabyte. Over those same months the pool claim moved, from "30m+ Residential IPs" in January 2025 to "80m+" in July 2025.

Work on the trade marks continued too. Another US filing for WEBSHARE, made on 24 July 2024, swears to a first use on 1 September 2017. That is ten days later than the date in the 2021 filings. On 18 November 2024 the mark became an international registration, with Canada and Brazil among the countries named. Its EU part was removed from the register in June 2025, while the EU mark of 2021 stays registered until 2031.

Source: USPTO status records, EUIPO and TMview, read 10 October 2026. Every mark is held by Webshare Software Company. The US files give its form as a Delaware corporation and keep the same US attorney in 2021 and in 2024.

Customer numbers grew on the company's pages: 56,876 customers in 2024, then 64,773 on 10 October 2026. The same homepage that day also claimed "90K+ Paying customers"; the About page said "60K+ Paid users" and "120K Monthly active users".

What Webshare's own pages say about its owner

No version of the terms or the privacy policy that we read names Oxylabs. The privacy policy in force since 2022 speaks of "our ultimate holding company" and gives it no name.

Oxylabs does appear in two other places on the site. A page on residential sourcing sorts providers into grades and gives "Oxylabs, Webshare" as the examples of its top grade, "Tier A". A page titled "Best Decodo Alternative in 2026" lists Oxylabs first among "Other Decodo Alternatives Worth Considering". Neither page says that Oxylabs owns Webshare.

On 10 October 2026 the sitemap held comparison pages against eight other providers, Decodo among them. None of them was about Oxylabs.

Who Webshare is connected to

Three brands a buyer might set against each other, Oxylabs, Decodo and Webshare, appear in one investor's portfolio. Our Decodo company page follows the sister brand, and who owns your proxy provider maps the whole group.

Webshare in court and in filings

We found no court case that names Webshare or Webshare Software. CourtListener's dockets and opinions hold ten hits for the word. Every one concerns something else: a 3D-scan viewer from FARO, a groupware product cited as prior art in a patent case, a 2009 company called Webshare, LLC. We did not search PACER itself.

Searching the full text of US Securities and Exchange Commission filings finds none by the company, Form D included. The copyright agent the terms name, "Webshare, Inc.", matches no California or Delaware company in the register copy; the only Webshare, Inc. there is a Nevada company of 1997.

What Webshare sells today, in short

Webshare sells shared and dedicated datacenter proxies, static residential (ISP) proxies and rotating residential traffic. On 10 October 2026, 100 shared datacenter proxies cost 2.99 dollars a month. Rotating residential ran from 3.50 dollars for one gigabyte to 1.40 dollars a gigabyte on the 3,000 GB plan, at 4,200 dollars a month. Ten free proxies and 1 GB a month still come without a card. Its Chrome extension had 100,000 users that day. The store lists the developer as "Webshare Software" at the Covina mailbox, declared as a trader under EU rules.

Three parts of the fine print bite. Plans renew every month until cancelled, and a refund needs a request within 48 hours and less than 0.1 GB used on residential traffic. Its help center lists cards, Google Pay and Apple Pay, and says Webshare does not plan to add PayPal. Yet the terms of October 2025 still say "We accept various payment methods through PayPal, or credit card".

On where its residential addresses come from, Webshare says they are "physical user devices" whose owners join "our suppliers' pools" for a reward. It does not name the suppliers. Full price tables are in our Webshare pricing breakdown. Our Webshare review compares it with other networks.

What customers report over time

In no year we checked did the score rise, except by a tenth in 2026. Trustpilot's live page refuses our server, so the March 2026 capture is the newest number we could read.

Is Webshare legit?

Webshare is, on the records, a registered business with a long trail. Webshare Software, Company is a Delaware corporation with a California registration since 2019. It owns nine granted patents and its trade marks in four jurisdictions, and it has sold proxies under one name since 2017. A larger proxy company paid for it in 2022, with two law firms and an adviser on record.

What the records do not show is who runs it today. The newest public statement of a chief executive is the 2022 announcement, and the names of the current officers in California sit behind a login.

If you are looking elsewhere

• If you want a provider outside the Tesonet portfolio, leave Oxylabs and Decodo off the list as well. HProxy belongs to no proxy or VPN group. Our Webshare review sets five other networks side by side.
• If your residential use comes in bursts, note that Webshare's bandwidth limits "are set monthly and do not roll over". HProxy's Lite residential traffic costs $0.50/GB for a single gigabyte, and a balance you do not use never expires.
• If you only want to check a proxy you already have, our free proxy checker tests it with no sign-up.

What we could not find out

1. Who ran webshare.io before December 2018. No page of 2017 or early 2018 names a company. Delaware's date of incorporation sits behind a login and a captcha.
2. Who holds the shares, and the exact price. The announcements say "Oxylabs"; only Sorainen's note gives a figure, and only a floor.
3. Who sits among the five current officers in California. California's own register refused our server and our office computer alike.
4. Which suppliers provide the residential addresses, and whether any come from Oxylabs. One ranking review guesses so; no record says it.
5. Why the residential claim rose from 30 million to 80 million addresses between January and July 2025, in the same months that prices halved.
6. Which owner address was recorded on the US patent files in October and November 2022.
7. Whether "Webshare, Inc.", the copyright agent in the terms, is a registered company.

We bought nothing and tested no Webshare proxy, because our rule is to read and never to buy. Prices, claims and officers change, so we will read these records again by 10 January 2027.

Sources

Every source below was read on 10 October 2026.

• Delaware and California company registers, as copied by OpenCorporates: Webshare Software, Company (7176968 and 4240202), Remotium, Inc. (3520011 and 5206130), officer search.
• US Patent and Trademark Office: WEBSHARE (serials 90700728 and 98664084) and WEBSHARE PROXY (90700690).
• European Union Intellectual Property Office: trade mark 018578321 and designation W01841159; TMview search for WEBSHARE.
• Patent records through Google Patents (USPTO and EPO data): US 11,575,655; 11,522,826; 11,736,435; 11,722,577; 11,637,909; 12,368,705; 12,587,586; 9,483,646; EP 3985935; EP 4145767; EP 4040760; EP 4210303.
• ARIN organisation WS-836; RIPE database search; Identity Digital registry record for webshare.io; certificate logs (crt.sh).
• Internet Archive: proxy.webshare.io (2017 to 2020), www.webshare.io (2020 to 2026) and Trustpilot's page for webshare.io.
• Oxylabs, "Oxylabs Acquires Webshare Software Company", and the GlobeNewswire release of 20 September 2022.
• Sorainen, "Oxylabs acquires Silicon Valley-based company", 20 September 2022; Corum Group, "Corum Advises Webshare in Acquisition by Oxylabs", September 2022.
• Avast Software, "Avast Software Acquires Mobile Virtualization Company Remotium", 8 July 2015.
• Tesonet, portfolio page; ScrapingBee, "ScrapingBee is joining Oxylabs' group"; EWDCI, member list.
• Webshare: terms of service (last updated 23 October 2025), privacy policy, intellectual-property page and About page.
• Webshare: sourcing page, "Best Decodo Alternative in 2026", residential page, help center and its Chrome Web Store listing.
• US courts through CourtListener, and the SEC's full-text search.