Launched in 2020, ProxyEmpire has dedicated itself to simplicity and transparency in delivering the sorts of data that change a company’s trajectory. ProxyEmpire offers proxies with granular targeting in over 170 countries, providing its clients with access to over 9 million residential and mobile IPs, as well as access to nearly 200,000 datacenter proxies. We caught up with ProxyEmpire director George Mitsov to talk about competitive advantages, compliance, and using the right prompt at the right moment.
EWDCI: Can you give us the elevator pitch for ProxyEmpire?
George Mitsov: ProxyEmpire provides a fully self-serve proxy platform that gives people access to any proxies—residential, mobile, and data center—at transparent and fair pricing. We’re one of the few providers offering unlimited-rollover bandwidth and 24/7 customer support. We do not lock clients into monthly subscriptions to keep the proxy bandwidth they have already paid for.
Also, we only work with proxy suppliers who adhere to ethical and industry best practices.
EWDCI: What do you wish more people understood about web scraping?
GM: Most people think of web scraping as something very niche, that very few companies do for specific purposes. In reality, a large portion of websites and companies rely on publicly-accessible data in order to provide their services.
EWDCI: How have global events impacted your growth and service offerings in the last few years?
GM: We had two major growth spurts. The first one was during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many people lost their jobs and they were looking for new streams of income or starting new side hustles and projects.
The second was when the average Joe started using tools like ChatGPT to bring ideas, which were previously unfeasible for people without specialized skills or big budgets, into reality in short amounts of time.
EWDCI: Have certain scraping-API use cases become more popular recently?
GM: Industries such as ecommerce and marketing have increasingly leveraged scraping-APIs for price monitoring, sentiment analysis, and lead generation. These tools are pivotal for maintaining competitive advantage in today’s markets, and for optimizing operational efficiency as much as possible.
EWDCI: What effect has the rapid growth of AI had on your service offerings?
GM: While in the past only large companies with big budgets or solo developers with in-depth knowledge were scraping and using proxies, nowadays we see a lot of people with little to no tech skills build their own scrapers, no-code SaaS products, and other cool projects thanks to the power of AI.
With the right prompts you can code pretty useful apps thanks to ChatGPT and other AI tools, recently we did a test where we wrote a large portion of the code using AI, and then we just had a developer troubleshoot a few bugs and we had a ready-to-go product in just a day instead of the seven to 10 business days we were quoted by a third-party developer. We’re actually developing several new products internally using AI to do the heavy lifting.
EWDCI: Where does government policy interface with your work on a daily basis?
GM: We’re committed to staying up to date and compliant with new government regulations, and in a fast-paced industry like ours new things are happening daily.
EWDCI: Why did your team find it important to join the EWDCI?
GM: When we were invited to join EWDCI we jumped at the opportunity, because we would love to be part of a bigger organization that has the power to positively influence the industry and present it to the general public in a better light. We loved the fact that EWDCI was embracing newer, smaller companies to join their ranks instead of having just two or three big companies.
Collaborating with peers in the proxy and data collection space, as well as regulatory bodies fosters transparency, innovation, and sustainable growth, crucial for maintaining industry leadership and client trust.