Blackwall quadruples valuation to $2.2B as web sites wrangle an more and more crowded web

Estonia-based Blackwall, which builds net site visitors safety instruments for internet hosting suppliers, mentioned on Tuesday that it has raised $100 million at a $2.2 billion valuation. It builds merchandise that helps web sites grapple with the skyrocketing quantity of bot site visitors, particularly AI brokers.

The Series C was led by AVP, with participation from present traders Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures. Blackwall’s govt chairman, Roi Carthy, advised TechCrunch this funding spherical elevated the corporate’s valuation by 4 instances since its previous fundraise in 2025.

Over the previous few years, net roads firms like Cloudflare, Akamai, Imperva and Blackwall have discovered themselves in an more and more beneficial however troublesome house: They’re on the frontlines, coping with DDoS assaults, indiscriminate scraping, botnet farms, malicious requests, and today, even swarms of AI agents going rogue. But it’s additionally an opportunity to make a killing by serving to internet hosting suppliers and web sites take care of all the possibly undesirable site visitors.

Blackwall, nonetheless, isn’t all in favour of competing with the bigwigs in its house. Instead of promoting its platform on to web sites, the corporate makes use of a “channel” method, working with website hosting, managed service and cloud suppliers to know their wants, after which handing over a bundle of instruments which they will customise. Those suppliers can then supply Blackwall’s safety instruments to their very own shoppers underneath their very own branding and retain management of that relationship.

There’s cash in it for each side. Co-founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg advised TechCrunch that internet hosting firms can combine and match safety elements to construct their very own resolution in keeping with what they wish to present to their finish clients, set the costs, and share a minimize of the earnings with Blackwall. The firm initially offers its clients a free tier displaying the site visitors and threats hitting their community, however costs for any safety or instruments to handle the threats.

In addition to offering providers like menace intelligence, certificates administration, DDoS safety and site visitors routing, Blackwall examines its clients’ net site visitors to distinguish precise guests and legit AI brokers from malicious bots, intruders, and disruptive site visitors. Rozenberg mentioned the corporate makes use of methods like digital fingerprinting to determine the software program sending a request — for instance, Microsoft Office or Codex — to filter out bots. In addition, the corporate makes use of its personal AI fashions at clients’ endpoints to investigate the intent and habits of the requests coming in to distinguish brokers despatched by an individual for an actual request versus a malicious bot.

In the approaching years, Rozenberg sees an enormous alternative rising as AI brokers start interacting and transacting with web sites on behalf of their customers. This ought to ultimately require programs to handle which brokers get entry, and on what phrases, and the way they’re licensed to make funds.

Blackwall isn’t alone in eyeing that chance. Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control lets web site homeowners enable or block particular person AI crawlers, and there’s additionally an choice to cost them for entry. But Rozenberg argues that Blackwall’s benefit lies in letting internet hosting suppliers supply such site visitors administration providers themselves as a substitute of handing the shopper relationship to a different safety supplier.

Blackwall plans to make use of the funding to increase its operations throughout North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, and develop extra safety tooling for internet hosting, cloud and managed service suppliers.