hiQ Labs
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2012
- HeadquartersMountain View, United States
- Headcount11–50
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
What hiQ Labs does
hiQ Labs is a private U.S. data science company founded in 2012 and headquartered in Mountain View, California, that built employee and people-analytics products on top of enriched, publicly available professional profile data. Its core activity was the large-scale collection of publicly accessible LinkedIn profile information, which it then packaged into data enrichment and analytical outputs sold to business customers interested in workforce, talent, and organizational analytics. The company differentiated through data acquisition scale rather than through proprietary first-party data sources.
hiQ Labs raised approximately $11.4M across four disclosed funding rounds between March 2014 and June 2016, with investors including Moonshots Capital, Corporate Executive Board (CEB), Hard Yaka, and Double M Partners. The CEB investment signaled an explicit orientation toward HR and people-analytics buyers as the primary commercial segment. The company was co-founded by Darren Kaplan, who served on the board.
The company's defining strategic event was the 2019 Ninth Circuit ruling in hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, which held that scraping publicly accessible data does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The decision created a landmark precedent favorable to public-data scraping as a business model, but also entrenched the company's dependency on data sourced from a single, adversarial upstream platform. The current operating status of hiQ Labs cannot be confirmed from the available data; the most recent verifiable activity is the 2019 ruling, and no post-2019 funding, product, or revenue disclosures are present in the source material.
hiQ Labs firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- hiQ Labs
- Legal name
- hiQ Labs
- Website
- https://hiqlabs.com
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2012
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 11–50 employees
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
hiQ Labs industry classification
Industry- Product category
- Workforce Analytics Software
- NAICS
- Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (51821), Web Search Portals and All Other Information Services (51929)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Employment Agencies (7361)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Human Capital Management (HCM) & Payroll Platforms (HDAEAEAJ)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- Survey, Panel & Fieldwork Services (BPAHALAJ), Reference Data Management (RDM) (HDAEADAE)
Keywords
Where hiQ Labs is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- Mountain View
- HQ country
- United States
- HQ region
- North America
Markets served
hiQ Labs business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Personnel, Technology or R&D, Marketing or Sales, Operations
hiQ Labs product offering
Product offeringCore offering
hiQ Labs is a data science company that collected publicly available professional profile data (notably from LinkedIn) and applied it to human capital analytics. It delivered employee people-analytics and data-enrichment products and services to businesses seeking insights about workforce composition, skills, and attrition risk. The firm gained industry recognition through the 2019 Ninth Circuit ruling in hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, which confirmed that scraping publicly accessible data does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Products and services
- People Analytics / Employee Data Enrichment Service
Companies that use hiQ Labs
Customer profileIdeal customer profiles1 record
hiQ Labs technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- No
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
hiQ Labs partnerships and signals
Strategic signalRecent moves6 records
hiQ Labs competitors and assessment
Company assessmentBroad incumbents
- ZoomInfo: ZoomInfo is a leading B2B contact and company intelligence platform that aggregates professional data at scale for sales, marketing, and recruiting teams. It overlaps with hiQ Labs' people-data enrichment and workforce analytics value proposition, but operates as a much broader incumbent with its own data graph.
- LinkedIn (Talent Insights / Recruiter): LinkedIn itself offers native workforce and talent analytics products (Talent Insights, Recruiter) built on its own first-party professional graph. It is a broad incumbent in the same end market hiQ Labs targeted, and its data-access policies are central to hiQ Labs' legal and operational context.
Direct peers
- Apollo.io: Apollo.io combines a large B2B contact database with sales engagement tooling, directly competing with hiQ Labs' data enrichment use cases for sales and recruiting teams. Both serve go-to-market teams that need enriched professional profile data to power outbound and prospecting workflows.
- People Data Labs: People Data Labs builds and sells large-scale person and company datasets via API, used for identity resolution, enrichment, and people search. It is one of the closest direct peers to hiQ Labs' public-data aggregation model and shares the same downstream buyers in sales, recruiting, and analytics.
- Lusha: Lusha provides B2B contact and company data enrichment, with a focus on browser-extension-based workflows for sales and recruiting. Like hiQ Labs, Lusha's core value is professional profile enrichment, making it a directly comparable data-product peer.
- Cognism: Cognism provides B2B sales intelligence and contact data, with strong positioning in EMEA, directly competing with hiQ Labs for sales and marketing data enrichment budgets. Its revenue-aligned data products serve the same buyers.
- Diffbot: Diffbot operates one of the largest independent web data extraction and knowledge graph products, scraping and structuring public web data at scale. It competes in the same public-data-extraction category as hiQ Labs, though with a broader focus beyond professional profiles.
- Clearbit: Clearbit provides company and contact enrichment APIs that power go-to-market, product, and customer data workflows. It is comparable to hiQ Labs in the data-as-a-service layer for B2B enrichment and serves similar product-led and enterprise customers.
Emerging players
- Apify: Apify is a web scraping and automation platform that lets developers build and run scrapers for public data extraction, overlapping directly with hiQ Labs' data collection infrastructure. It is comparable as a peer in the public-data scraping tooling and services ecosystem.
- HG Insights: HG Insights provides technographic and firmographic data intelligence for B2B go-to-market teams, drawing partly on public-sourced signals. It is comparable to hiQ Labs as an analytics-led enrichment provider selling into similar enterprise GTM and operations functions.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat2 records
Key risks5 records
Key highlights5 records
Customer concentration
hiQ Labs social profiles
Digital presencehiQ Labs financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
hiQ Labs leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles1 record
hiQ Labs funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds4 records
Investors4 records
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
hiQ Labs M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about hiQ Labs
What does hiQ Labs do?
hiQ Labs is a data science company that collected publicly available professional profile data (notably from LinkedIn) and applied it to human capital analytics. It delivered employee people-analytics and data-enrichment products and services to businesses seeking insights about workforce composition, skills, and attrition risk. The firm gained industry recognition through the 2019 Ninth Circuit ruling in hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, which confirmed that scraping publicly accessible data does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Is hiQ Labs a public or private company?
hiQ Labs is a private company. It is classified as venture growth investor backed and is currently operating.
When was hiQ Labs founded?
hiQ Labs was founded in 2012. It employs 11 to 50 people.
Where is hiQ Labs based?
hiQ Labs is headquartered in Mountain View, United States, in the North America region.
Who are hiQ Labs's main competitors?
Broad incumbents on record are ZoomInfo and LinkedIn (Talent Insights / Recruiter). Direct peers are Apollo.io, People Data Labs, Lusha, Cognism, Diffbot and Clearbit. Emerging players are Apify and HG Insights.
Does hiQ Labs have an API?
No public API is recorded for hiQ Labs.
What industry is hiQ Labs in?
hiQ Labs's product category is Workforce Analytics Software. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HDAEAEAJ, Human Capital Management (HCM) & Payroll Platforms, with a secondary code of BPAHALAJ, Survey, Panel & Fieldwork Services. Its NAICS code is 51821 and its SIC code is 7372.