What Bright Info is today
Bright Info is a sell-side broker for company data, based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We work for the owner of a company's working record (Slack, email, CRM, support tickets, code, documents, call recordings) and make AI data buyers compete for a bounded license to it in a sealed-bid process. We never buy data and never take a position in it; we are paid a commission by the buyer the owner chooses. The process is described on the homepage, and the buyers we invite are compared on Data monetization companies.
The short version. BrightInfo was founded in Tel Aviv in May 2012 as a machine-learning personalization engine that read a website's content and each visitor's behaviour in real time. In 2021 the name and domain passed to the current ownership, which took the company into data services: building and running data pipelines and data lakes for client companies. That work led directly to today's business, brokering licenses to the same kind of company records on behalf of their owners. It is one company and one website throughout, not two.
The domain's first life (1999–2000)
Before any of this, brightinfo.com belonged to Brightinfo.com, Inc., an internet company in Mountain View, California. In March 2000 it merged into Annuncio Software in an all-stock deal recorded in Annuncio's SEC filings; Annuncio was later acquired by PeopleSoft. That company has no connection to the business described below beyond the domain name. If a company database says "BrightInfo acquired by Annuncio Software", it is describing this 2000 transaction, not the Tel Aviv company or the current one.
BrightInfo in Tel Aviv (2012–2021)
The BrightInfo most people have heard of started in Tel Aviv. Its roots are in Softlib, an Israeli software company founded in the early 2000s that built knowledge-delivery software for service and support teams on top of its own semantic-analysis technology. Boaz Grinvald ran Softlib from 2009. In May 2012 he founded BrightInfo as a sister company to point that technology at a marketing problem: most visitors to a business website leave anonymous, never having found the content that would have kept them.
BrightInfo launched publicly on September 16, 2013. The product was a real-time personalization engine: one JavaScript tag, a crawl that read and classified every page on a site, and a model that profiled each visitor's behaviour as they browsed and recommended the next most relevant piece of content, in a sidebar on the page or as the visitor was about to leave. It was built for B2B marketers at small and mid-sized companies and sold on a freemium plan. Over the next two years it added a WordPress plugin (June 2014), a HubSpot integration (April 2015) and an Act-On connector (July 2015). Flint Capital led a financing round in December 2014; Titanium Investments and Docor International Management are also listed as investors.
Grinvald left in January 2017 to run Revuze. The company continued under the name Inhavo, describing the same engine as a content intelligence platform, and wound down around 2021. Israeli company records list Inhavo Ltd., formerly Softlib and BrightInfo, as having ceased operations in the fourth quarter of 2021.
What carried forward was not the product but the idea underneath it. A personalization engine is a data system first and a marketing tool second: it has to ingest everything a company has published, structure it, and learn from a stream of behavioural events in real time. That is the discipline the next chapter was built on.
New ownership and the move into data services (2021–[YEAR])
In 2021 the BrightInfo name and brightinfo.com were acquired by the current ownership [confirm: from Inhavo Ltd.; asset or domain purchase] and carried forward. Rather than relaunch the marketing product, the new team took the company into data services.
Between 2021 and [YEAR], BrightInfo built and ran data infrastructure for client companies: [ingestion pipelines from operational systems such as Slack, email, CRM and ticketing], [data processing and normalisation], and [data lake builds on cloud platforms] for [types of clients, e.g. operating companies in X and Y industries]. [Optional scale: N clients, N terabytes, N pipelines.] The work meant sitting inside companies' message archives, CRMs, ticket queues and code repositories and turning them into something structured enough to query and govern.
From data services to data brokerage ([YEAR]–today)
Two things became clear from that work. The working records of ordinary operating companies, years of decisions, escalations and handoffs, were exactly what AI labs and training-data vendors had started paying for. And the owners of those records were being approached one buyer at a time, with no way to know what the record was worth or whether the offer was fair. In [YEAR] BrightInfo [stopped taking new data services engagements and] relaunched as a sell-side broker: the same understanding of company data, now used to value a record, prepare it, and make every serious buyer bid for it at once.
The company operates as Brightinfo from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Erik Rivera, the founder, explains why we built it this way on the homepage. How we handle data during a process is on Security and data handling, and where our numbers come from is on Sources and methodology.
One company, three chapters
- 2000
- Brightinfo.com, Inc. (Mountain View, CA), the domain's original owner, merges into Annuncio Software. Unrelated to the later business beyond the domain.
- 2002–2004
- Softlib Ltd. founded in Tel Aviv: knowledge-delivery software for service and support teams, built on semantic-analysis technology.
- May 2012
- BrightInfo founded in Tel Aviv by Boaz Grinvald as Softlib's sister company, applying the same technology to website content and visitor behaviour.
- Sep 2013
- Public launch of the real-time content personalization engine for B2B websites.
- 2014–2015
- WordPress plugin; Flint Capital-led financing; HubSpot integration; Act-On connector.
- Jan 2017
- Grinvald departs. The company continues as Inhavo with the same engine.
- 2021
- Inhavo Ltd. ceases operations. The BrightInfo name and brightinfo.com are acquired by the current ownership. The company moves into data services: pipelines, data processing and data lakes for client companies.
- [YEAR]
- BrightInfo relaunches as a sell-side broker for company data, operating as Brightinfo from San Juan, Puerto Rico.
- 2026
- Publishes the data monetization companies comparison and the price ranges on this site.
Names you may see in third-party records
- BrightInfo and Bright Info. The same company. One word was the 2012–2017 brand; two words is how we write it today.
- Inhavo Ltd. The Israeli legal entity's name from 2017, formerly Softlib Ltd. and BrightInfo. Listed as ceased in late 2021. Its product was the BrightInfo engine.
- Softlib (Softlib Software, Softlib Ltd.). The predecessor and sister company whose semantic technology BrightInfo was built on.
- Brightinfo.com, Inc. The 2000 Mountain View company acquired by Annuncio Software. Unrelated beyond the domain.
- Bright Data and Bright Info Solutions (UK). Unrelated companies that share part of the name.
Sources
The dates above come from public records: Annuncio Software's Form S-1 filings with the SEC (March 2000 merger); the September 16, 2013 launch announcement on Business Wire; PRWeb releases for the WordPress plugin (June 2014), HubSpot integration (April 2015) and Act-On connector (July 2015); the IVC Research Center and Startup Nation Central company records for Inhavo Ltd.; and the BrightInfo company page on LinkedIn. Where records disagree on a date we say "around" and use the earlier one. Corrections: hello@brightinfo.com.