The story
WOT Services was founded in 2006 by Sami Tolvanen and Timo Ala-Kleemola, who wrote the MyWOT software as post-graduates at the Tampere University of Technology in Finland. They launched the service officially in 2007, with Esa Suurio as CEO. Suurio was replaced in November 2009, and both founders left the company in 2014.
In 2009, MySQL founder Michael Widenius invested in WOT Services and became a member of the board of directors. WOT Services is no longer a portfolio company of Widenius's venture capital firm, OpenOcean.vc.
WOT Services has partnerships with Mail.ru, Facebook, hpHosts, Legit Script, Panda Security, Phish tank, GlobalSign and TRUSTe.
By November 2013, WOT Services had over 100 million downloads.
A 2016 Norddeutscher Rundfunk investigation revealed that WOT Services sold user activity data collected from its apps and browser extensions to third parties in violation of the privacy policies of the app stores on which the software was distributed.
In 2016, it was revealed that WOT Services had made money by collecting browsing history data from its users and selling that usage data; it said that it anonymized the data before selling it.
From Wikipedia’s article on WOT Services, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4