i2Coalition Member Spotlight: Byteful

Since its foundation in 2020, Byteful has established itself as a leader in the proxy and web intelligence industry, providing over 35 million unique IP addresses to more than 25 thousand customers worldwide. The team credits its success to combining cutting-edge technology and ethical proxy acquisition with a customer-centric approach. We caught up with Byteful founder and Managing Director Timur Gok to discuss what happens when the Internet’s agent-focused trajectory meets the oh-so-human value we call trust.

i2Coalition: Can you give us the elevator pitch for Byteful?
Timur Gok: Byteful is a UK-based web data infrastructure company built on an ethically-sourced proxy network, which matters more than ever now that so much of the traffic hitting the Internet comes from AI agents rather than people.

We want every agent to have its own IP address and reliable, real time access to the open Internet, so it can pull accurate information the moment it needs it instead of hitting blocks, stale caches, or rate limits.

Behind that network is a modern platform with API’s built for deep integration, so developers and AI systems can plug in directly rather than bolting proxies on as an afterthought. That platform has let us grow to processing over 30 billion requests a month for more than 1,700 customers, and it’s what we’re doubling down on as we build for the next wave of automation and agentic AI.

i2Coalition: You changed your name from Ping to Byteful this year: can you tell us about the idea behind that pivot? What does that mean for your team, and for your customers?
TG: Ping Proxies served us well, but the name was built for a niche we’d already outgrown. Demand for web data has exploded, and AI systems increasingly depend on access to the public Internet, which starts with proxies and IP infrastructure. We’d already been powering web scraping and large scale data collection for thousands of companies through our API-first platform, and Byteful is the next step in scaling that into a platform built for agents, automation, and the next wave of Internet usage.

For my team, it meant rebuilding our stack from the ground up, including our own Rust-based proxy engine, alongside the new name. For customers, it’s the same infrastructure and API, just under a name that actually fits where we’re headed.

i2Coalition: What impact do you think recent geopolitical events have had on your more recent growth?
TG: I’ve seen growing fragmentation of the Internet, from data localization rules to country-level restrictions on VPNs and proxies. That’s pushed more businesses to look for infrastructure providers who can offer clean, well-documented, ethically-sourced access across borders. At the same time, the race to build and train AI systems has made large-scale, reliable web data access a competitive necessity for a much wider range of companies than before, not just the data and scraping specialists I used to serve. Both trends have widened Byteful’s customer base beyond where proxies used to sit.

i2Coalition: What does “trust” mean to you?
TG: Trust means our customers can rely on us for their core business operations. To earn that trust, we need to do two things: govern how our proxies are used so they aren’t turned toward harm, and source our proxies ethically in the first place.

We’ve backed that up with an Ethical Sourcing Policy and a Made in Britain certification for how our software is built. On the usage side, it means having a real Acceptable Use Policy and enforcing it, working with organizations like the Internet Watch Foundation, and being willing to cut off customers who cross the line even when it costs us revenue.

Trust isn’t something you claim, it’s something customers and regulators can verify by looking at how we actually operate. Our EWDCI initiative membership and Trust Certification is the next step in that journey.

i2Coalition: Why did your team find it important to join the i2Coalition?
TG: Proxy infrastructure gets talked about by regulators more than it gets talked to. Joining the i2Coalition gives us a seat at the table to help shape sensible policy instead of reading about our industry secondhand.

i2Coalition: Which i2Coalition initiatives connect most deeply with your team’s ethos?
TG: The Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative, since it’s built around the same four pillars we think about every day: websites, customers, proxies, and data. It’s the same belief we operate on, that scraping doesn’t have to be a dirty word if the industry defines responsible practice for itself instead of leaving that to bad actors or reactive legislation.

i2Coalition: Where does government policy interface with your work on a daily basis?
TG: Mainly UK and EU data protection laws, anti-scraping and computer misuse rules, and sanctions or export controls for customer onboarding.