Shop for residential proxies and you will build a shortlist that feels diverse: Oxylabs, Decodo, Webshare, maybe a Nord or Surfshark VPN alongside it for good measure. It looks like a field of independent rivals competing for your money. A lot of it is not. A surprising share of the biggest proxy and VPN brands trace back to a single Lithuanian venture builder called Tesonet and the two founders behind it. This is the sourced map of who is actually related to whom, why the industry is quieter about it than you would expect, and what it changes when you are choosing where to spend.
We run a competing proxy network and we track every rival in it, so we have reason to keep this map accurate rather than sensational. The honest version is not "one shadowy company secretly owns everything." It is more interesting than that, and more useful: these brands are siblings and cousins from one house, and once you can see the house, the marketing reads very differently.
What Tesonet actually is
Tesonet is a venture builder, founded in Vilnius in 2008 by Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliauskas, two childhood friends who tried and abandoned a long list of projects before anything stuck (Wikipedia). A venture builder is not a normal holding company. It is closer to a startup studio: it launches, funds, incubates, and accelerates companies rather than simply buying and owning them outright. That distinction matters for accuracy, because the relationships below are a mix of outright subsidiaries, incubated spin-outs, and brands connected mainly through shared founders. Lumping them all together as "owned by Tesonet" would be the kind of overstatement that gets a claim like this dismissed.
What is not in dispute is the scale. Tesonet and its founders describe a portfolio spanning cybersecurity, web data, AI and more, and the brands that trace back to it include some of the largest names you will meet while shopping for proxies or a VPN (tesonet.com). Two of those brands became Lithuanian unicorns. The founders built the country's proxy-and-VPN cluster more or less from their own network of companies.
The proxy side: Oxylabs, Webshare, ScrapingBee, and Decodo
Start with Oxylabs, which was founded in 2015 as a company within the Tesonet group (Wikipedia: Tomas Okmanas). It grew into one of the largest residential-proxy and web-data platforms in the world, and in 2025 it raised $130 million from Warburg Pincus at a reported $3.6 billion valuation (Proxyway). Oxylabs did not just grow, it bought:
- Webshare, the Silicon Valley proxy provider popular for its generous free tier, was acquired by Oxylabs in 2022 (Proxyway).
- ScrapingBee, the France-based scraping-API service, was acquired by Oxylabs on June 19, 2025, in an eight-figure, all-cash deal (ScrapingBee's own announcement; Proxyway).
So Oxylabs, Webshare and ScrapingBee are one group with a parent and two acquired brands. Then there is Decodo, which most people still know as Smartproxy. Smartproxy operated from 2018 and rebranded to Decodo on April 22, 2025, keeping the same accounts, pricing and infrastructure (Decodo; Proxyway). Decodo sits in Tesonet's portfolio alongside Oxylabs.
Put that together and four names off a typical proxy shortlist, Oxylabs, Webshare, ScrapingBee and Decodo, all trace back to the same Vilnius house.
The VPN side: Nord Security and Surfshark
The same roots run through the consumer-VPN world, which matters because plenty of people shopping for proxies also buy a VPN, and treat the two purchases as unrelated.
Nord Security, the company behind NordVPN, was founded in 2012 by Okmanas, Sabaliauskas and their childhood friends, and was incubated by Tesonet (Wikipedia: Tomas Okmanas). NordVPN launched in 2013, and Nord Security became a unicorn in 2022. Then, on February 2, 2022, Nord Security merged with Surfshark, the other big Lithuanian-founded VPN, under a merged group registered in the Netherlands as Cyberspace (NordVPN's announcement; Surfshark's announcement; PR Newswire).
Here is the honest nuance both companies stress, and it is worth repeating rather than burying: Nord and Surfshark say they continue to operate autonomously, on separate infrastructures and product roadmaps. They are one corporate group, not one product. But if you have ever seen NordVPN and Surfshark presented as the two independent finalists in a "best VPN" face-off, it is worth knowing they answer to the same merged parent, and that parent shares its origin with the proxy brands above.
The map, in one place
Here is the relationship laid out plainly. Read the "relationship" column carefully, because the type of link is the whole point.
| Brand | What it sells | Relationship to the house |
|---|---|---|
| Oxylabs | Residential + datacenter proxies, scraping APIs | Founded 2015 as a Tesonet-group company |
| Webshare | Proxies (big free tier) | Acquired by Oxylabs (2022) |
| ScrapingBee | Scraping API | Acquired by Oxylabs (June 2025) |
| Decodo (ex-Smartproxy) | Residential proxies, scraping | In Tesonet's portfolio |
| Nord Security (NordVPN) | Consumer + business VPN | Co-founded by Tesonet's founders, incubated by Tesonet |
| Surfshark | Consumer VPN | Merged with Nord Security (2022), same group |
Who is genuinely independent
The point of a map like this is not that the house is bad. Oxylabs and Decodo are capable products, and being incubated by a successful venture builder is a normal, legitimate way to build a company. The point is that "independent alternatives" often are not, and a few genuinely are:
- IPRoyal and SOAX are independent of Tesonet.
- Bright Data (formerly Luminati) is Israeli and majority-owned by the UK private-equity firm EMK Capital, not connected to Tesonet at all.
- HProxy is independent. We are not part of a larger proxy or VPN group, and we do not own or get owned by the other names on your shortlist.
Independence is not automatically better, and being part of a big group is not automatically worse. But it is a real, checkable fact about a provider, and it changes how you should read everything else.
Why this actually matters when you buy
Three practical consequences, none of them conspiracy, all of them worth money.
Your "redundancy" might be an illusion. Serious scraping operations often split traffic across two or three providers so that if one degrades, the others carry the load. If the two providers you picked for that safety net are siblings running on related infrastructure, you do not have the independence you paid for. Knowing the map lets you pick genuinely separate suppliers when redundancy is the goal.
"Best proxy" comparisons can be a house reviewing itself. A large amount of proxy comparison content ranks Oxylabs against Webshare, or Smartproxy-now-Decodo against Oxylabs, as if refereeing independent rivals. Sometimes that is a house quietly comparing its own products, where every outcome keeps a customer inside the group. We write comparisons too, including HProxy vs Oxylabs, HProxy vs Decodo and HProxy vs Webshare, and the difference is that we are on the outside of that group and we say so.
Ownership is a sourcing question too. Where a provider sits tells you who is accountable for how its IP pool is built. We went deep on that in the NetNut botnet takedown, where a publicly traded parent did not save customers from a pool allegedly built out of hijacked devices. Ownership does not guarantee clean sourcing, but knowing who actually stands behind a network is the first question, not the last.
The honest caveats
This map is built from public company announcements, corporate filings, and reputable reporting, and it is dated: acquisitions and rebrands keep happening, so treat every relationship here as true as of mid-2026 and check the primary sources if a detail is load-bearing for you. The single most important nuance, again, is that "Tesonet" is a venture builder, not a monolithic parent. The links range from outright ownership (Oxylabs and Webshare) to a merged group (Nord and Surfshark) to shared founders and incubation. Anyone who flattens all of that into "one company owns the whole market" is overstating it, and overstating it is how a true and useful map gets waved away.
Where HProxy fits
We wrote this because it is exactly the kind of thing a proxy company with something to hide would never publish, and we do not have that thing to hide. HProxy is independent, priced at $0.65/GB pay as you go with no KYC and a balance that does not expire, and we would rather compete on being able to answer plainly who we are and where our IPs come from. If you want to see the network before you trust any of this, test the free proxy checker and the live free proxy list, then start on residential proxies when you are ready. And if you are weighing a specific one of the brands above, our honest head-to-heads are linked throughout this piece.
Sources
- Wikipedia, Tesonet (venture builder, founded 2008 by Okmanas and Sabaliauskas; portfolio)
- Wikipedia, Tomas Okmanas (Nord Security co-founder; Oxylabs founded 2015 within the Tesonet group; invested in 50+ ventures)
- Proxyway, Oxylabs Group Acquires ScrapingBee (Webshare acquired 2022; ScrapingBee acquired June 2025; $130M Warburg Pincus, $3.6B valuation)
- ScrapingBee, ScrapingBee is joining Oxylabs' group (acquisition, June 19, 2025, eight-figure all-cash)
- Decodo, Smartproxy is Now Decodo and Proxyway, Smartproxy Rebrands, Becomes Decodo (rebrand effective April 22, 2025)
- NordVPN, Nord Security joins forces with Surfshark and Surfshark, Surfshark merges with Nord Security (merger February 2, 2022; group registered in the Netherlands as Cyberspace; brands operate autonomously)
- PR Newswire, Nord Security and Surfshark join forces (merger announcement)