Ahrefs at a glance
Question | Answer | As of |
|---|---|---|
Who owns Ahrefs? | Founder and CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko and a small group of private shareholders; no investors and no public shares | Nov 2026 |
Valuation | None set by a funding round; Forbes Ukraine estimated $400–500M | May 2023 |
Total raised | $0 in outside investment | Nov 2026 |
Revenue | Over $150M in ARR, per CMO Tim Soulo; S$173.5M (about US$130M) in 2024, per Singapore filings | Oct 2026 |
Customers | Marketers at 44% of the Fortune 500, per Ahrefs | Nov 2026 |
Employees | 148, working from 27 locations | Nov 2026 |
CEO | Dmytro Gerasymenko, founder (also spelled Dmitry Gerasimenko) | Nov 2026 |
Founded | 2010, when crawling began; the paid service launched in 2011 | 2010 |
Headquarters | Marina One East Tower, Singapore; offices in Palo Alto, Cambridge (Massachusetts) and Tokyo | Nov 2026 |
Products | Ahrefs’ SEO and AI-search tools, the Yep search API, Letaido and Firehose | Nov 2026 |
Email format | {first}.{last}@ahrefs.com (88% of known addresses) | Nov 2026 |
Ahrefs Pte. Ltd. (UEN 201227417H), first registered as Web Stats, was incorporated in Singapore on November 7, 2012 (Registry). US customers contract with Ahrefs Services LLC, a Delaware company (Ahrefs).
Who owns Ahrefs?
Ahrefs is private and has “stayed profitable without a dollar of outside funding”, it says (Ahrefs). Founder Dmytro Gerasymenko started it with a few hundred thousand dollars of his own money (AIN) and has turned down investors since, Sequoia and Google’s funds among them (dev.ua). Ahrefs Pte. Ltd. is an exempt private company, which in Singapore means no more than 20 shareholders and none of them a company (Registry); registry data shows 10 (RecordOwl). No one’s stake has been published.
Being bootstrapped lets Ahrefs share profits with its staff. In January 2025 everyone received a bonus of about 43% of their year’s salary, and Gerasymenko raised the bonus pool from 3% to 5% of ARR, CMO Tim Soulo wrote (LinkedIn).
What is Ahrefs’ revenue?
Ahrefs doesn’t publish revenue, but it does share milestones. Tim Soulo wrote in October 2026 that he had helped grow it “from under $8M to over $150M in ARR” (X). Singapore filings, compiled by The Straits Times for its fastest-growing companies lists, show revenue of S$173.5 million in 2024, about US$130 million (The Straits Times), more than six times its 2017 revenue.
Year | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
Oct 2026 | Over $150M ARR (CMO Tim Soulo) | |
Dec 2025 | Over $100M ARR from self-serve sales alone (Tim Soulo) | |
2024 | S$173.5M revenue | |
2022 | S$137.7M revenue; Ahrefs crosses $100M ARR (Mar 2023) | |
2021 | S$115.3M revenue | |
2020 | S$86.7M revenue | |
2019 | S$68.0M revenue | |
2018 | S$44.9M revenue; “we crossed $40M ARR” (Gerasymenko) | |
2017 | S$27.6M revenue | |
2011 | $1M revenue in its first year |
The S$ figures are for Ahrefs Pte. Ltd. in Singapore dollars; S$1 was worth about US$0.75 in 2024. For scale, Semrush, its biggest rival, reported $443.6 million of revenue for 2025 (Semrush) before Adobe completed its purchase of Semrush in April 2026 (Semrush). In 2023 Ahrefs’ PR head said Semrush had ten times as many people but only two to three times the revenue (dev.ua).
Has Ahrefs raised money? Funding and valuation
No. “I think I got emails from almost every active venture capital fund in the world,” Gerasymenko said in 2021, but “we were profitable from year one and growing at a very good pace, so external funding was not needed” (Vulcan Post). In August 2026 SiliconANGLE reported that Ahrefs “has never raised outside money” (SiliconANGLE).
Without a funding round there is no market valuation. Forbes Ukraine, after reviewing its financials, put Ahrefs at $600–700 million in May 2021 (Forbes Ukraine) and at $400–500 million in May 2023, with a discount for being private (Forbes Ukraine).
Some company databases list a $1.3 million round in April 2022. We found no primary source for it. That month Ahrefs was raising money for Ukrainian charities, not for itself (Search Engine Land).
What does Ahrefs sell? Products and pricing
Ahrefs started as a backlink checker; marketers at 44% of the Fortune 500 now use it, it says (Ahrefs). It sells a suite of SEO and AI-search tools: Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit, Rank Tracker and Brand Radar, which tracks how brands appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot (Ahrefs). Plans start at $29 a month (Starter); Lite is $129, Standard $249, Advanced $449 and Enterprise $1,499 a month on an annual contract (Ahrefs). Every paid plan includes API and MCP access, which lets AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT query Ahrefs’ data (Ahrefs).
In March 2022 Ahrefs moved to usage-based pricing. It said only the heaviest 20% of users should pay more, blamed group buys that resold one account to hundreds of people, and apologized for “teething problems” (Ahrefs).
Product | What it is | Launched |
|---|---|---|
Ahrefs | SEO and AI-search toolset, built on its own crawler | 2011 (Ahrefs) |
Ahrefs Free | Free site audit and backlink data for site owners; launched as Ahrefs Webmaster Tools | Sep 2020 (Ahrefs) |
Yep | A search engine that promised creators 90% of ad profits; now a search API for AI agents, from $4 per 1,000 requests (Ahrefs) | Jun 2022 (TechCrunch) |
Brand Radar | Tracks a brand’s mentions in AI answers | 2025 (Ahrefs) |
Firehose | A real-time stream of new web content, “built for AI agents” | 2026 (Ahrefs) |
Letaido | A workspace of AI marketing agents | Aug 2026 (SiliconANGLE) |
Ahrefs also bought Detailed, Glen Allsopp’s SEO research site, in September 2025; Allsopp joined the company (Detailed).
Why Ahrefs runs its own data centers
Ahrefs crawls the web itself and keeps the data on its own hardware instead of renting cloud servers. Its index holds 494 billion pages, processed on 735,000 CPU cores, and it says renting that capacity would cost $900 million over three years (Ahrefs). From mid-2017 to mid-2023 it spent $122 million on its infrastructure, against about $1.1 billion for the cheapest AWS equivalent (Ahrefs). Its Yep1 supercomputer ranked 34th in the world on the TOP500 list in June 2024 and 92nd in June 2026 (TOP500).
Its crawler, AhrefsBot, is the most active SEO crawler on Cloudflare Radar and the 10th most active web crawler of any kind, Ahrefs said in July 2026 (Ahrefs).
Who is the CEO of Ahrefs?
Dmytro Gerasymenko, also spelled Dmitry Gerasimenko, founded Ahrefs and is its CEO. Born in Nizhyn, Ukraine, he studied computer science at Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and started building Ahrefs’ crawler in 2010 with Igor Pikovets, now its CTO (AIN). He also runs Ahrefs’ newer products, Yep, Letaido and Firehose (X).
Person | Role | Source |
|---|---|---|
Dmytro Gerasymenko | Founder and CEO | |
Igor Pikovets | CTO; Gerasymenko’s university groupmate and one of the first to join him | |
Tim Soulo | CMO and product advisor | |
Raman Varabets | Chief Accounting Officer | |
Leila Nazari | Head of Enterprise Strategy | |
Maychelle Ramos | Director of HR and Business | |
Ryan Law | Director of Content Marketing |
Full bio and contact routes: Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko: email address, LinkedIn and bio.
Where is Ahrefs headquartered?
Ahrefs is headquartered in Singapore, at Marina One East Tower, 7 Straits View (Ahrefs); its registered address is 16 Raffles Quay (Ahrefs). It also has offices in Palo Alto, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Tokyo (Ahrefs), and its 148 people work from 27 locations (Ahrefs). It spent its first year in Ukraine before moving to Singapore in 2012 (Vulcan Post).
Many of its people are Ukrainian. After Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ahrefs blocked all access from Russia and Belarus (X) and raised more than $1.5 million for Ukrainian charities (Search Engine Land).
What is Ahrefs’ email format?
Ahrefs employees use {first}.{last}@ahrefs.com: 88% of known addresses per LeadIQ (LeadIQ) and 74% per Prospeo (Prospeo). Staff mail runs on Google Workspace, and Ahrefs has said its domain catches mail sent to any name, so email verifiers may not confirm a guessed address.
Need | Official address |
|---|---|
Customer support and billing | support@ahrefs.com |
Press | pr@ahrefs.com |
Privacy | privacy@ahrefs.com |
Jobs | careers@ahrefs.com |
All patterns, domains and official inboxes: Ahrefs email format.
Key events: 16 years without investors
Date | Event |
|---|---|
Oct 14, 2026 | CMO Tim Soulo puts Ahrefs’ ARR above $150M (X) |
Sep 16, 2026 | Doubles MCP usage on all plans; “MCP has been our fastest growing product this year” (X) |
Aug 12, 2026 | Launches Letaido, an AI agent workspace for marketers (SiliconANGLE) |
Mar 7, 2026 | Opens the Firehose beta (X) |
Sep 2025 | Acquires Detailed (Detailed) |
Aug 2025 | Brand Radar 2.0 tracks brands in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot (Ahrefs) |
Jan 2025 | Every employee receives a bonus of about 43% of salary (LinkedIn) |
Jul 11, 2024 | Gives $1M to rebuild Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv (X) |
Jun 2024 | Its Yep1 supercomputer ranks 34th on the TOP500 list (TOP500) |
Oct 2023 | Stops renewing the 15% of legacy plans that use the most data (Search Engine Journal) |
Mar 9, 2023 | Crosses $100M in ARR (LinkedIn) |
Jun 2022 | Launches Yep.com (TechCrunch) |
Mar 2022 | Moves to usage-based pricing (Ahrefs); blocks Russia and Belarus (X) |
Sep 22, 2020 | Launches the free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (Ahrefs) |
2018 | Crosses $40M in ARR (AIN) |
Nov 7, 2012 | Ahrefs Pte. Ltd. is incorporated in Singapore (Registry) |
2011 | The paid link index launches and makes $1M in its first year (Ahrefs) |
2010 | Gerasymenko and Igor Pikovets start building the crawler (AIN) |
More on Ahrefs and similar companies
Ahrefs email format: patterns, domains, official inboxes and the catch-all
Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko: his story, career timeline and contact routes
Top bootstrapped SaaS companies in 2026: Ahrefs and other companies that grew without investors
Singapore SaaS companies: the full list, with CEOs and headcounts
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