Blackwall Raises $100 Million at a $2.2 Billion Valuation as Bot and AI-Agent Traffic Floods the Web

The internet’s traffic problem now has a $2.2 billion answer in Estonia. Blackwall, which builds web traffic security tools for hosting providers, announced on Tuesday, October 20 that it has raised $100 million in a Series C round at a $2.2 billion valuation — quadrupling its valuation since its previous fundraise in 2025. TechCrunch reported the raise the same morning, and Tech.eu confirmed the structure: the round was led by AVP, with participation from existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures.

A company that sells to the people who host the web

Blackwall’s model is what makes it different from the names most readers know in this space. Companies like Cloudflare, Akamai and Imperva sell security directly to website owners. Blackwall does not. As TechCrunch explains, the company takes a channel approach: it works with web hosting, managed service and cloud providers, hands them a bundle of tools they can customise, and lets those providers offer the security to their own clients under their own branding, retaining control of the customer relationship. Blackwall stays invisible infrastructure; the host keeps the customer.

The product bundle, per the company’s announcement carried by Business Wire, spans bot mitigation, DDoS protection, a web application firewall, load balancing, server-side encryption and management of agentic AI traffic. Deployed inside hosting providers’ own infrastructure, it identifies real visitors and legitimate automated traffic and separates them from malicious bots, attacks and traffic abuse, filtering billions of requests per day for millions of websites, per TechFundingNews’ account of the announcement.

Why now: the bots are winning the volume war

The timing is the story. Automated traffic — scrapers, botnet farms, malicious requests and, increasingly, swarms of AI agents crawling and acting on the web — has grown from a nuisance into a defining cost of running a website. TechCrunch frames Blackwall and its rivals as frontline companies in that fight: the work is difficult and unglamorous, but every site that cannot tell a customer from a crawler farm either overpays for capacity or loses real visitors in the noise. A valuation that quadruples in roughly a year and a half is investors pricing that reality, not a single product launch.

Executive chairman Roi Carthy told TechCrunch the new round increased the company’s valuation four times since its previous fundraise in 2025. TechFundingNews adds the comparison point: it covered Blackwall’s €45 million round in March 2025, when the company was still known to many by its earlier name, BotGuard. The company says the new valuation makes it Europe’s most valuable cybersecurity scaleup — a title TechFundingNews notes is contested, since Exein made the same claim at a $1.7 billion valuation.

From a recipe site’s bot problem to a traffic ecosystem

The origin story is unusually concrete for a company at this valuation. Co-founders Nikita Rozenberg and Denis Prochko started the company after a recipe website Prochko built drew unwanted automated traffic that crowded out real visitors, per TechFundingNews. The problem they hit as small site owners — bots eating the bandwidth meant for people — is the same problem they now sell the solution to, one level up the stack, through the hosts.

Rozenberg, the co-founder and CEO, set out the ambition in the announcement: “The web is becoming more automated, more distributed and more complex, but the infrastructure that powers it remains highly fragmented,” he said, as quoted by Tech.eu. “Our ambition is to build the traffic management ecosystem that brings those worlds together. This funding allows us to expand globally, deepen our platform and give hosting and infrastructure providers the technology they need to participate in the next generation of the web.”

Where the $100 million goes

The expansion plan is geographic as much as technical. Blackwall will use the investment to establish and expand operations across 12 strategic regions spanning North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, per the Business Wire announcement, and to add new traffic security capabilities so providers can cover more of their customers’ needs through a single infrastructure layer. Tech.eu notes the company had already crossed the unicorn threshold weeks earlier: last month it was reported to have reached a €1 billion valuation and ranked fifth in TopTech 2026, the annual ranking of Estonia’s 30 most valuable tech companies.

Vestbee’s account of the round adds the economics that make hosts receptive: blocking unwanted traffic before it reaches their servers cuts infrastructure costs, and reselling Blackwall’s features under their own brand gives providers a new revenue stream without building the technology themselves. In a hosting market Tech.eu sizes at $200 billion — and a fragmented one, because infrastructure has to stay close to the businesses it serves — that pitch, save money and make money with the same layer, is the whole business.

Whether Blackwall can hold its channel position as the giants it refuses to fight head-on build their own AI-traffic controls is the open question. But on the morning the raise was announced, the direction of the market was not in doubt: the web’s visitors are increasingly not people, and the companies that can tell the difference are being valued accordingly.

More from the Tech Desk: read our report on the AI-agent hacking campaign uncovered this week, the CoreWeave debt story and more on the Previously news front.