Congratulations to Pratap Ranade and Ryan Rowe as the web-scaping-as-a-service company which they co-founded (called Kimonolabs) has been acquired by Palantir.
Kimonolabs started as a Winter 2014 Y Combinator class startup. It recently raised USD5M in 2014, but this hasn’t help delaying their choice to shutter their doors for jobs at Palantir. Pratap explained that the startup has not been able to have the impact it wanted within the two years from launch. So Kimonolabs falls too the wayside where many other web-scaping tools have gone leaving their 125K users in the lurch.
They have given 2 weeks notice to their users to migrate data and services from the platform. The last day is 29 Feb 2016. The absolute last day for API services is 31st March 2016. Your data will be purged and Palantir will not have access to it. If you depend on this service, you will probably be scrambling at this point for alternatives. I am sure that when you assess the risk for utilising a technology like Kimonolabs, you will consider the financial and resource stability of the company.
Here is a list of alternative web scraping tools and technologies. We also recommend utilising established SaaS ETL services as viable alternatives.
