# BackWeb

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/backweb/  
**APIs profiled:** 0

BackWeb Technologies Ltd. was an Israeli-American enterprise software company founded in 1995 by Eli Barkat, Nir Barkat, Yuval Rakavy, Iftah Sneh and Lior Hass, with offices in Ramat Gan, Israel and San Jose, California. BackWeb pioneered "Polite" push technology — background delivery of software updates, patches, alerts and marketing content to desktops using only idle bandwidth so it did not disrupt the user or the corporate network. Its Polite Communication Server, Offline Access Server, e-Accelerator and Proactive Portal products were deployed by Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Ericsson, Compaq and SAP, and integrators used the BackWeb Server Extension API and BackWeb Automation SDK to publish content from external data sources into the Polite server. The company IPO'd on NASDAQ (BWEB) in June 1999 after raising roughly $13M privately from investors including Goldman Sachs, Intel and Trinity Ventures, peaking near $38M in annual revenue. It never recovered from the dot-com collapse, was delisted from NASDAQ and moved to the OTC Bulletin Board, approved a voluntary liquidation in 2012, suspended operations and divested its patents in 2014, and began distributing remaining cash to shareholders. BackWeb is defunct: there is no operating company, no developer portal, and no live API. The backweb.com domain is a parked Afternic for-sale lander. This profile is retained as a historical record only.

## Kin Score — 5.0 / 100 (minimal)

Scored 2026-08-21 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 5.0).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 50.0 |
| Contract Quality | 0.0 |
| Governance | 0.0 |
| Contract Governance | 0.0 |
| Operational Transparency | 0.0 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 0.0 |
| Commercial Clarity | 0.0 |
| Access Clarity | 0.0 |

## Agent readiness — 0.0 (human-only)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | no |
| Agentic Access | no |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | no |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| Rate Limit Signal | no |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |

## Access

Unknown — onboarding: unknown, pricing: unknown, trial: no (confidence: low).

## Tags

Company, Enterprise Software, Push Technology, Content Delivery, Software Distribution, Israel, Defunct, Historical

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/backweb/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.