IPXO CEO Ramutė Varnelytė on AI, Internet Infrastructure and the Future of IP Leasing

We sat down with Ramutė Varnelytė, CEO of IPXO, who was named a 2026 Woman in Tech Leader of the Year by the Tech Ascension Awards, to discuss the evolving internet infrastructure landscape, the growing demand for IPv4 addresses, and how AI is reshaping the market. Varnelyte shares insights into IPXO’s rapid growth, its customer-first approach, its expansion into Asia, and her vision for the future of IP address management and leasing.

What drew you to internet infrastructure, and what does this recognition mean to you and the team?

Before IPXO, I spent 10 years in a niche hardware service business, working for Samsung, Apple and other global manufacturers. It was B2B at its core. I learned how the biggest players act, but also how smaller retailers and B2B platforms work, and what each of them needs from a partner. I also learned how to handle critical situations, when something breaks and a client’s business depends on how fast you fix it. Internet infrastructure turned out to be an extension of that experience rather than a new start. It is the same mix of global players and smaller companies, the same B2B relationships built on trust, and the same pressure when things go wrong. Only the product is different. I wanted to understand the tech world from the inside, not only serve it, so I started looking for a way into IT, tech and everything related to it.

About eight years ago I met one of IPXO’s co-founders. At the time they were running a hosting business, and they gave me a chance to try myself in sales and marketing there. That is where my path to IPXO started. Back then I didn’t really understand what “tech” would look like for me, and infrastructure became my way into it.

This recognition belongs to the team as much as to me. We work in a market most people never see, from Vilnius, with customers all over the world. It is good to see that work noticed. I see this award as the result of five years of intense work by everyone at IPXO. Personally, I am very happy to be an example for other women who are starting their journeys and aiming for leadership roles and ownership.

IPv4 addresses officially ran out years ago, yet demand keeps growing. Why do IPv4 addresses still matter in 2026, and what problem does IPXO solve for businesses that need them?

First of all, it is about connectivity: being reachable on the internet. IPv4 is still universal and covers the whole world. Every server, website and connected service needs an IP address to be reached. IPv4 is the original address system, with about 4.3 billion addresses, and every region of the world ran out of new ones between 2011 and 2019.

The successor, IPv6, has almost unlimited addresses, but adoption is still only around 50% by Google’s measure. Many websites and servers still work only over IPv4. So companies run both protocols: IPv6 where it works, and IPv4 where it is still the only way in. That is why demand keeps growing. Hyperscalers alone have acquired around 130 million IPv4 addresses over the last five years. AI has added a new wave: AI runs on data, and collecting data at scale runs on IPv4. On our platform, demand from AI-related companies grew from about 100,000 addresses a month in 2024 to around 1.2 million a month in the third quarter of 2026.

At the same time, many telcos, universities and older corporations hold addresses they received decades ago and no longer use. IPXO connects the two sides. Holders lease out unused space safely and earn from it. Businesses get clean addresses quickly, for a monthly fee instead of a large upfront purchase. Today we manage more than 17 million IPv4 addresses on our platform.

IPXO closed 2025 ahead of its revenue target and grew its leased address pool by 70% year over year. What were the key strategic decisions behind that growth?

First, innovation in a traditional business. The IP address market still works in a very traditional way: B2B, mostly through direct sales. Our platform changes that and gives companies a fast entry point to the market.

Second, supply and trust. Supply comes first. We only started growing once we had something to sell. Securing supply means earning the trust of holders and partners, and that cannot be copied. It took us three years. Now we have growing, secure demand, we invest in customer acquisition, and we are in a scale-up position. I learned this in e-commerce and retail: you cannot sell what you don’t have.

Third, people. We flattened our structure for better visibility and effectiveness and aligned everyone through OKRs. We also grew a lot, bringing in many competent people, including local sales people in key markets.

Underneath all of this are our values: trust, which we build first, ownership, a growth mindset, and customer obsession, the newest one, which we introduced last year. No single value matters more than the others. What matters most is people and their mindset, and that comes through values alignment.

You led a company-wide Customer Obsession initiative. What does that look like day to day, and how do you build accountability around it across teams?

We started in a very simple way. We split into teams, went deep into the platform and our processes, and looked at everything from the customer’s side. We also talked to customers directly. Every person in the organization got to experience the customer journey.

For some people it was their first time looking at the platform. We usually expect only customer-facing teams to know how it works. But what about an accountant, or someone with completely different responsibilities? I had noticed that decisions were being made only within each person’s own area. Everyone wanted to do their job and hit their KPIs, without seeing what sits behind the whole process.

The workshops showed us the gaps in the journey. We expanded our Product team, shipped several new features, and now most of our pipeline is about customers. One example is KYC: we cut the time it takes by 40%. That is not only about saving our team’s time. It is about how long a customer waits for resources. Our goal is to let good customers get IPs as soon as possible, and to block bad actors just as fast.

Our automation team now builds features that let customers do more on the platform by themselves, and our new subscription model makes it clear what you can and cannot do. Inbound lead generation is at a record high, and customer satisfaction during onboarding is essential to us.

Customer Obsession is about daily work, not workshops. But the workshops must come first.

Asia accounted for half of IPXO’s new customer acquisitions. Why was Asia the right market to prioritize, and what did expanding there teach you?

Asia is where much of the next wave of digital and AI infrastructure is being built, and the APNIC region has very little IPv4 left to hand out. Demand is real and growing, but the path to addresses is not simple.

What Asia taught us is that the hardest costs are often invisible. In some markets, the cost of building infrastructure is charged not only in dollars, but in delay, in regulatory risk, and in unwritten rules you learn by breaking them. The registry layer is a good example: across the region, leasing is not prohibited, but it is not clearly defined either, and the rules differ between national registries.

So we learned to slow down in order to move faster. We invested in understanding each market’s rules, building local relationships and educating customers, not only selling to them. The companies that can make this foundational layer readable for their customers win.

IP leasing naturally raises questions about abuse and address reputation. How does IPXO keep its ecosystem trustworthy for both IP holders and lessees?

This becomes more important every year. Our Abuse Prevention team fights bad actors every day. Only clean ranges come onto the platform, and new addresses are checked against more than 90 blocklists and abuse databases, with monitoring continuing throughout the lease.

We also manage risk at the customer level. Every company on our platform has a Company Health Score, based on its activity, network behaviour, payment history and risk factors such as industry and region.

Speed matters most. We cooperate with law enforcement, including the FBI, and with community members who work on abuse, so we can act as fast as possible. The community can trust us to handle issues quickly.

Looking ahead, how do you see the IP address market evolving over the next five years, with IPv6 adoption and AI-driven infrastructure demand, and where do you want IPXO to be?

I see a parallel with my ultramarathon experience. I have been running ultramarathons for ten years. I have a coach, a nutrition plan and a hydration strategy, and I still never know how the race will end. It is the same with tech startups and scale-ups: you can have everything planned, and you still never know how it will end. The next five years in this market feel the same. Nobody planned for AI, and nobody can promise what comes next. Experience and good past results don’t give you the route, but they help you read the terrain. The most important thing is to be in the middle of it and build the future together with the industry. 

What I can see is the direction. I see IPXO as a one-stop shop for IPv4 and IPv6: platform, management and infrastructure. We are already deeply involved in helping AI companies build the right infrastructure, using the best practices we have learned from global players.

IPv4 leasing will become one part of a much bigger picture, not a standalone service. IP addresses remain a unique and essential part of internet infrastructure, and we will keep building solutions around them. Our new R&D team is already working on it. Stay tuned!