Inside Decodo’s Product Evolution with CEO Vaidotas Juknys

It's genuinely rewarding. We've spent years refining our technology to make web data collection not just possible, but practical for teams that aren't necessarily technical. Winning Gold for Outstanding Business Intelligence Solution tells us that the broader business community recognizes the value of what we're building. For our team, it's a strong signal that our shift toward intelligence-driven tools, not just raw infrastructure, is resonating in the right way.

We'd been watching how businesses increasingly rely on web data to make strategic decisions, from pricing intelligence and market research to AI model training and sentiment analysis. 

Our platform sits at the center of that workflow, and we felt the combination of our ethically-sourced proxy infrastructure, Web Scraping API, and AI integrations represented a compelling case for business intelligence innovation. The fact that we serve such a wide range of use cases, while keeping the experience accessible to non-developers, gave us confidence that our entry would stand on its own merits.

The rebrand from Smartproxy to Decodo in April 2025 was probably the most significant inflection point. It wasn't cosmetic. It represented a strategic decision to move beyond being a proxy provider and position ourselves as a platform for structured, real-time web intelligence. 

That shift allowed us to develop tools like our MCP Server, which let AI agents access live web data directly. It also changed how we think about our users. We stopped asking "how do we give people better proxies?" and started asking "how do we give people easier access to data?"

The web itself is a constantly moving target. Anti-bot systems have become increasingly sophisticated, and the challenge of delivering reliable data at scale only gets harder each year. Maintaining a 99.98% success rate across 125+ million IPs while keeping pricing competitive is an ongoing balancing act. 

On the business side, transitioning from a well-established brand to a new one always carries risk. We had to earn trust all over again with prospects who didn't yet associate Decodo with seven years of Smartproxy's track record. The way through was straightforward. Keep the infrastructure rock-solid, keep the support responsive, and let the product speak for itself.

This award reinforces our credibility in a space where trust matters enormously. We plan to use it as a proof point when engaging enterprise clients who need confidence that our platform meets the highest standards of business technology. 

Beyond sales, it's also motivating for our team. Recognition like this helps attract talent and reinforces the culture of quality we've been building. Most importantly, it validates our direction. We'll keep pushing into AI-powered data collection and making business intelligence accessible to teams of every size.

The process of preparing a submission forces you to step back and articulate what makes your work meaningful. Day to day, you're focused on shipping features and solving problems. An award entry makes you zoom out and evaluate the bigger picture. That alone is valuable. 

And if you win, it opens conversations with people who might not have discovered you otherwise. For a company like ours, competing against well-known names in business technology, that visibility matters.

This is very much a collective achievement. Our engineering team deserves enormous credit for the infrastructure that underpins everything we do. Maintaining the scale and reliability of our proxy network while rolling out new products like the AI Parser and MCP Server is no small feat. Our customer support team, which operates 24/7, also plays a critical role. 

They're the ones who hear what users need and feed that insight back into product development. And our marketing and content teams have done an incredible job of communicating a complex, technical product in a way that's genuinely accessible.

The integration of AI and web data is the defining trend. Businesses are moving from manually researching competitors or tracking prices to building automated pipelines that feed real-time web data directly into AI models. We're also seeing demand shift toward structured, AI-ready data formats rather than HTML. Anti-bot systems will continue to evolve, which means the providers who invest in ethical sourcing and adaptive technology will pull ahead. 

We're preparing by deepening our AI integrations, expanding our MCP Server capabilities so AI agents can browse the live web autonomously, and doubling down on our Web Scraping API, introducing new features that will allow businesses to collect real-time publicly available data even more easily.

Focus on the user's actual problem, not the technology you're excited about. Early on, it's tempting to build features because they're technically impressive. The products that win are the ones that remove friction from someone's day. I'd also say: don't underestimate the compounding value of great customer support. In B2B, word of mouth still travels faster than any marketing campaign.

Be specific. Awards judges see hundreds of entries, and vague claims about innovation or disruption all start to blur together. Ground your submission in real outcomes: what problem you solved, for whom, and what measurable impact it had. Use concrete numbers where possible. And don't bury the lead. Put your strongest differentiator front and center so the judges see it immediately.

We're doubling down on AI-native data collection. Our integrations, which connect our Web Scraping API with tools like n8n, OpenClaw, LangChain, and others, are a major focus area. We're also expanding our no-code capabilities so that business analysts and marketers can build data pipelines without writing a line of code. 

On the infrastructure side, we're growing our IP pool, investing in its quality, and continuing to invest in ethical sourcing. The goal is to make Decodo the default platform for any team that needs reliable, structured web data at scale.

The businesses that will thrive in the next few years are the ones that treat web data as a strategic asset, not an afterthought. The tools to collect, structure, and act on publicly available data have never been more accessible. We're proud to be part of that shift, and we're grateful to the Noble Business Awards for recognizing the work that goes into making it happen. To anyone considering entering: do it. The process alone will sharpen how you think about the value you create.