Brave Software, Inc.

About Brave Software, Inc.

Financials

Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.

Products by Brave Software, Inc.

All products by Brave Software, Inc. reviewed by our AI panel of experts.

Brave SearchAI Search & Knowledge

Web search with its own independent index, no Google or Bing dependency

Free7.6/10

How Our Review Panel Scores Brave Software, Inc.

Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Brave Software, Inc.'s product on their own terms. They landed within 0.6 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.

Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.

Competitive Landscape

Who Brave Software, Inc. competes with, and how they differ.

Kagi7.8/10

Kagi runs a subscription-only, ad-free model with no advertising or data-broker revenue at all, versus Brave Search's free tier funded partly by Brave's own privacy-preserving ad network; Kagi ships no browser of its own, unlike Brave's browser-first distribution.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Perplexity7.5/10

Perplexity is answer-engine-first, generating cited conversational answers as the default experience rather than a ranked results page, and ships its own Comet browser -- a closer product-line overlap with Brave (search index + AI assistant + browser) than Kagi or You.com.

2 products reviewed on TopReviewed

You.com7.9/10

You.com leads with an AI-agent/answer-engine interface and API-first distribution rather than a traditional search results page, competing more directly with Brave's AI-summarized search ("Answer with AI") than with Brave's core indexing; like Kagi, it has no native browser.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

D

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo predates Brave Search by over a decade (2008) as a privacy-focused search engine, monetizing through non-tracking contextual search ads rather than Brave's crypto-based ad-rewards model, and is distributed primarily as a browser extension/app rather than Brave's full browser-first stack.

M

Mozilla Firefox

Firefox is built by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation and funded chiefly by search-placement royalties, versus Brave's for-profit, crypto-token-funded model with a built-in ad-replacement rewards system; the rivalry has personal history too, since Brave co-founder Brendan Eich co-founded Mozilla and formerly served as its CEO.

Company Timeline

Key milestones in Brave Software, Inc.'s history, with sources.

1. Jul 22, 2026Milestone

   News Corp countersues, alleging masked crawlers and verbatim content scraping

   News Corp filed its own suit alleging Brave disguised its web crawlers to evade publisher blocking and sold "verbatim or near verbatim" summaries of News Corp journalism to AI companies before March 2025; the case remains unresolved as of this report.

   ibtimes.com
2. Mar 13, 2025Milestone

   Sues News Corp seeking declaratory judgment over content indexing

   After News Corp sent a cease-and-desist letter alleging unauthorized scraping of Wall Street Journal and New York Post content, Brave filed suit in San Francisco federal court seeking a declaration that indexing the content for search -- and using it with AI chatbots -- is fair use; Brave noted Brave Search holds under 1% of the search market.

   ca.finance.yahoo.com
3. Nov 2, 2023Launch

   Brave Leo AI assistant launches on desktop

   Brave shipped Leo, a browser-native AI assistant, to all desktop users free of charge on Meta's Llama 2 model, with a $15/month Leo Premium tier offering Anthropic's Claude Instant.

   siliconangle.com
4. Oct 20, 2021Launch

   Brave Search becomes the default search engine for new installs

   Following a June 2021 beta, Brave Search became the default search engine for new Brave browser installs on desktop, Android and iOS, alongside a new Web Discovery Project for privacy-preserving search-quality data collection.

   theregister.com
5. Mar 3, 2021Acquisition

   Acquires Tailcat search engine from ex-Cliqz team

   Brave acquired Tailcat, an independent search engine built by former Cliqz developers, as the technical foundation for what would become Brave Search; deal terms were undisclosed, and Tailcat backer Hubert Burda Media became a Brave shareholder.

   techcrunch.com
6. Jun 8, 2020Milestone

   Affiliate-link controversy over crypto-exchange URLs; CEO apologizes and reverses practice

   Brave was found auto-completing typed-in cryptocurrency exchange URLs (Binance, Coinbase and others) with affiliate referral codes. CEO Brendan Eich publicly apologized -- "we will never revise typed in domains again, I promise" -- and the company ended the practice.

   engadget.com
7. Jun 20, 2018Launch

   Brave begins opt-in testing of Brave Ads / BAT rewards

   Brave started voluntary, opt-in testing of an on-device ad-targeting system that pays users 70% of gross ad revenue in BAT, the mechanism underpinning its Brave Rewards program.

   techcrunch.com
8. May 31, 2017Funding

   Basic Attention Token (BAT) public token sale raises ~$35M in under 30 seconds

   Brave sold its full allocation of BAT -- an Ethereum-based token, not equity -- for 156,250 ETH, worth roughly $35 million at the time per contemporaneous reporting; the public sale sold out in under 30 seconds.

   techcrunch.com
9. Aug 1, 2016Funding

   $4.5M seed round led by Founders Fund, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, Digital Currency Group

   A second seed round brought Brave's total funding to $7 million to date, ahead of its planned 1.0 launch.

   techcrunch.com
10. Jan 20, 2016Launch

    Brave browser publicly released (v0.7)

    Brave released its ad-blocking, tracker-blocking browser (version 0.7) for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android.

    venturebeat.com
11. Nov 17, 2015Funding

    $2.5M seed round from private investors

    Brave Software announced it had completed a $2.5 million seed round from private investors, its first outside funding, while expanding its technical team.

    prnewswire.com
12. 2015Founded

    Brave Software founded by Brendan Eich and Brian Bondy

    Brendan Eich (creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla, where he later served as CEO) and Brian Bondy (a former Mozilla Firefox engineer) founded Brave Software to build a faster, ad-blocking, privacy-focused web browser.

    brianbondy.com