First, Luis was not making any money of captchas. He was just an academic, happy that someone was actually using his creation. Later, he ended up building a small commercial version of captcha and selling it to Google, a product that became the Google Image Labeler.

By 2006 however, captcha was widely used on the internet, and this time Luis started a massively profitable company called Recaptcha. Every time someone was typing in a short segment of captcha, on the back that action was actually digitizing printed text. Meanwhile, companies like New York Times and Google were paying Recaptcha for every input.