Brave Software, Inc.

Who owns Brave?

Brave Software, Inc., a private San Francisco company, owns the Brave browser and Brave Search. Co-founder Brendan Eich is CEO and controlling figure, with venture investors holding minority stakes.

Is Brave publicly traded?

No. Brave Software is privately held. It raised venture funding and a 2017 BAT token sale but has never listed shares.

Who founded Brave?

Brendan Eich and Brian Bondy founded Brave in 2015. Eich invented JavaScript and co-founded Mozilla; Bondy was a Mozilla and Khan Academy engineer. Eich serves as CEO and Bondy as CTO.

Is Brave Search really independent?

Yes. Brave Search runs on its own index of roughly 40 billion pages, one of only three independent global-scale indexes in the West and the only one outside Google and Microsoft. It does not license Google or Bing results.

How many people use Brave?

The Brave browser passed 101 million monthly active users in September 2025, with 42 million daily users. Brave Search handles approximately 1.9 billion queries per month.

How does Brave make money?

Through opt-in privacy-preserving ads that share revenue with users via the BAT token, premium services like VPN and Talk, the commercial Brave Search API, and search advertising, estimated at roughly 100 million dollars annualized in 2025.

Is Brave safe to use?

Brave is a legitimate browser that blocks ads and trackers by default and does not profile users. It is open source, based on Chromium, and its privacy claims are verifiable in the code.

Brendan Eich founded Brave in 2015, a year after departing Mozilla, the organization he co-founded and briefly led as CEO. Eich's credentials were singular: he invented JavaScript at Netscape in 1995 and helped build Firefox. Brian Bondy, a former Mozilla and Khan Academy engineer, joined as co-founder and CTO. The pair raised early venture funding to build a browser on the premise that the web's ad economy had become a surveillance system.

The first Brave browser shipped in 2016 with built-in ad and tracker blocking plus a Bitcoin-based publisher payment experiment, later formalized as the Basic Attention Token. The 2017 BAT initial coin offering raised 35 million dollars in about 30 seconds, funding development through the browser's slow-growth years while competitors treated privacy as a niche.

Growth compounded through the early 2020s as privacy went mainstream. Brave acquired the Tailcat search engine in 2021 and launched Brave Search on its technology, making it the first company in years to operate a fully independent Western index. The browser passed 50 million monthly users in 2023 and 101 million monthly active users by September 30, 2025, adding roughly 2.5 million net new users per month. Brave Search crossed 20 billion annualized queries in the same period.

By 2026 the company had layered an AI answer engine and Ask Brave conversational search onto the index, integrated the Leo assistant into the browser, and reached an estimated 100 million dollars in annualized revenue, still private, still independent, and still positioned as the privacy-by-default web stack.

Brave's ethics positioning is its product architecture: privacy by default, no user profiling, transparent opt-in advertising, and published research on tracker blocking. It supports open web standards and positions itself against surveillance-based business models.

The company holds no formal B Corp certification. Its crypto token draws periodic criticism from users who distrust tokenomics, and its ad model has faced questions about replacing publisher ads with its own, debates the company addresses through its revenue-share structure. No regulatory violations are on record.

Referral code incident (2020): Brave was caught auto-completing URLs to add affiliate referral codes, including for cryptocurrency sites, contradicting its privacy-first image. The company apologized and disabled the practice.

Brendan Eich's politics: Eich's 2014 Mozilla resignation over a political donation remains an occasionally resurfaced controversy attached to the CEO personally rather than to company conduct.

BAT skepticism: The Basic Attention Token's crypto mechanics draw criticism from both anti-crypto users and questions about whether the token economy is essential to the privacy mission.

No data breaches, regulatory fines, or product recalls are on record.