Bitly

Bitly provides link management, QR codes, and engagement analytics for brands, businesses, and marketing teams. Users can create branded short links and custom QR codes to connect audiences with digital content and measure interactions across online and offline channels. Bitly Assist lets customers create links and QR codes conversationally and ask questions about their performance. Weekly Insights automatically highlights changes across links, referrers, geographies, and devices. Both AI features launched in 2026 for paid-plan customers.

Founded in 2008 inside Betaworks, Bitly’s founders include John Borthwick and Todd Levy; Peter Krivkovich is its current CEO. Its original URL shortener addressed the constraints of sharing long links on social platforms. Beyond its commercial products, Bitly introduced and open-sourced NSQ in 2012. The distributed messaging system separates producers from consumers and buffers channels independently, allowing downstream services to process the same event stream without a slow consumer holding up other channels.

Bitly received a $63 million majority investment from Spectrum Equity in 2017. Its business extends beyond free URL shortening to paid tools for managing and analyzing customer interactions. In 2026, the company reported more than 5.7 million monthly active users and 600,000 paying customers worldwide. Its MCP server also makes Bitly functionality accessible from external AI tools.