Blackwall Quadruples Valuation to $2.2B Amid Bot Surge
Estonia-based Blackwall has secured a $100 million funding round, quadrupling its valuation as websites grapple with rising volumes of bot and AI traffic.
Radwan AbdulhadiEditor and technology writer
Series C Funding and Valuation Growth
Estonia-based Blackwall announced on Tuesday that it has raised $100 million at a $2.2 billion valuation, according to details shared with TechCrunch. The Series C investment was led by AVP, alongside returning investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures, and Tera Ventures.
Executive Chairman Roi Carthy noted that the latest round quadrupled the company's valuation since its previous fundraise in 2025. The capital injection comes as web infrastructure companies face mounting pressure from automated web traffic.
Navigating Crowded Internet Traffic and Bots
Web infrastructure firms like Blackwall, Cloudflare, Akamai, and Imperva find themselves managing an increasingly difficult online environment. Operators currently face DDoS attacks, indiscriminate scraping, botnet farms, malicious requests, and even swarms of AI agents going rogue.
To address these issues, Blackwall builds products designed to help websites grapple with the skyrocketing volume of bot traffic and automated AI agents. The company utilizes digital fingerprinting to identify the underlying software sending requests—such as Microsoft Office or Codex—to effectively filter out disruptive automated actors.
A Channel-First Approach for Hosting Providers
Unlike many competitors that sell security platforms directly to end-user websites, Blackwall adopts a distinct channel approach. The firm works directly with web hosting, managed service, and cloud providers, supplying customizable bundles of tools that these providers can brand and offer to their own clients.
Co-founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg explained that hosting companies can mix and match security components to build custom solutions, set their own pricing models, and share a percentage of the resulting revenue with Blackwall. The company initially provides a free tier that displays traffic and threats hitting a network, while charging for active protection and mitigation tools.
AI Models and Future Traffic Management
Beyond core infrastructure offerings like threat intelligence, certificate management, DDoS protection, and traffic routing, Blackwall employs its own AI models at customer endpoints. These models analyze incoming request intent and behavior to separate legitimate visitors and approved AI agents from malicious intruders.
Looking ahead, Rozenberg anticipates a major opportunity as AI agents begin interacting and transacting with websites on behalf of users. While alternatives like Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control allow website owners to manage or charge individual crawlers, Blackwall's leadership emphasizes that its model preserves direct client relationships for hosting providers.
Global Expansion Plans
With the fresh funding secured from its Series C round, Blackwall intends to scale its business footprint globally. The company plans to expand operations into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East, while continuing to develop advanced security tooling for cloud, hosting, and managed service providers.
Sources
- TechCrunchBlackwall quadruples valuation to $2.2B as websites wrangle an increasingly crowded internet
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