SerpApi
👤 Julien Khaleghy (French founder-engineer. Built SerpApi solo in 2017 and kept it bootstrapped to about 35 people. Now says he may pursue an IPO.)🌐 site𝕏LinkedIn
A bootstrapped 2017 Google-scraper now feeds OpenAI and Perplexity — and Google is suing to shut it off.
Will it work? · our read
A rented moat. Won on boring reliability, then the AI wave made them essential. The catch: they resell data they don't own — and Google is now suing to cut it off.
01How the money moves
Scrape live Google / Bing / etc. SERPs into clean structured JSON
→
Meter every API call: free 250/mo to $275/mo, enterprise
→
AI labs + SEO tools pay for the live feed → about $3M/yr, $0 VC
02The numbers
about $3M/yrEstimateEst. ARR (third-party)
2025
the sentence on the page
SerpApi Austin , Texas , United States serpapi.com Generative AI Software Valuation $8.9M 2025 Revenue $3M (Est.) Funding $0 Team 27 Founded 2017 Company Revenue Valuation and Funding Founder and CEO…
Revenue is a third-party estimate — SerpApi has not disclosed official numbers. Sacra profile
getLatka estimates about $3M/yr; Google's own complaint calls it 'a few million a year.' Not officially disclosed.
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See a full teardown, free → ImportYetiSourcesSources last checked 25 August 2026
Search Engine Land — Google sues SerpApi over scraping and reselling Search data (Dec 2025).Sacra — SerpApi profile: bootstrapped since 2017, about 40% of revenue from AI companies, pricing tiers.getLatka — third-party estimate of about $3M revenue and a roughly 27-person team (2025).IPWatchdog — Google's complaint notes SerpApi 'earns a few million dollars in annual revenue.'SerpApi — first-party company and team page.
Revenue (about $3M/yr) is a third-party estimate from getLatka, loosely corroborated by Google's complaint calling it 'a few million a year' — not officially disclosed by SerpApi, so flagged EST and unverified. Team size varies by source (27 to 35). The 'sell the pickaxe / stayed neutral' framing is our read; the 2025 lawsuits, pricing, and the-40%-from-AI revenue mix are documented facts. We never score you.