The Little-Known Search and Browser Startup Generating $100 Million in Annualized Revenue

Consumer-focused AI developers such as OpenAI and Perplexity are jockeying for a share of the browser market, now dominated by Google’s Chrome. But before they have a chance of dethroning Chrome, they first have to surpass Brave.

Brave has been around for a decade and passed $100 million in annualized revenue in the first quarter of this year, said Brian Brown, its chief business officer, who declined to give more recent figures. (Annualized revenue refers to the prior month’s revenue multiplied by 12.) As of September, Brave’s browser had 100 million monthly active users, up from 77 million at the end of last year, he said.

The majority of its revenue comes from search, which is also part of its browser. Brave sells ads in search results using its sales force and also sells an application programming interface to customers such as Mistral and Cohere so they can access Brave’s search index, an organized database of webpages, when they provide web-based information to customers of their AI models. Brave has also powered search capabilities for Meta Platforms and Perplexity.

Growth from API sales has helped the San Francisco-based Brave generate free cash flow, Brown said. (The company’s investors include Founders Fund and Foundation Capital, though Brown declined to share how much funding it’s raised or at what valuation.)