By Hamza Faisal
Estonia-based Blackwall has raised $100 million at a $2.2 billion valuation, betting that the internet's bot problem is about to get a lot bigger — and a lot more expensive. The Series C round, announced Tuesday, values the web-traffic security startup at four times what it was worth at its previous fundraise in 2025.
The round was led by AVP, with existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures also participating, according to TechCrunch, which first reported the raise.
Too many bots, not enough humans
Blackwall builds security tools not for websites directly, but for the hosting providers that sit between them and the chaos of the modern web. That chaos is getting worse: distributed denial-of-service attacks, indiscriminate scraping, botnet farms — and now swarms of AI agents, some of them going rogue, battering sites with traffic that increasingly resembles real users.
The company examines its customers' web traffic to separate genuine visitors and legitimate AI agents from malicious bots, intruders and disruptive junk. Co-founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg told TechCrunch the company uses digital fingerprinting to identify the software behind each request — Microsoft Office versus Codex, for example — and runs its own AI models at customers' endpoints to analyze the intent and behavior of incoming requests, distinguishing an agent sent by a person on a real errand from a malicious bot.
Sell through the hosts, not around them
Rather than competing head-on with Cloudflare, Akamai and Imperva, Blackwall sells through a "channel" model: it hands web hosting, managed service and cloud providers a bundle of security tools they can customize and resell under their own branding, keeping the customer relationship for themselves.
There is money in it for both sides. Hosting companies can mix and match security components, set their own prices and share a cut of the revenue with Blackwall. New customers start on a free tier that shows them the traffic and threats hitting their networks; they pay for the protection that fixes them.
The services on offer include threat intelligence, certificate management, DDoS protection and traffic routing — plus the bot-versus-human sorting that is fast becoming the centerpiece of the business.
The agentic web needs a bouncer
Rozenberg's longer bet is on AI agents becoming real economic actors on the web. As agents start interacting and transacting with websites on behalf of their users, someone will need to decide which agents get access, on what terms, and how they are authorized to pay. Blackwall wants to be that bouncer.
It is not alone in eyeing the opportunity: Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control already lets site owners allow, block or charge individual AI crawlers. But Blackwall's executive chairman Roi Carthy argues the company has an edge by letting hosting providers offer traffic management themselves instead of handing the customer relationship to another security vendor.
The fresh capital will fund expansion across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, and new security tooling for hosting, cloud and managed service providers. Quadrupling the valuation in a year suggests investors agree: in an internet filling up with agents, telling the good traffic from the bad is big business.
By Hamza Faisal
