Blackwall Sees Valuation Surge to $2.2B Amidst the Online Landscape’s Growing Competition
Blackwall, a company based in Estonia that specializes in web traffic security solutions for hosting providers, announced on Tuesday that it has successfully secured $100 million in funding, achieving a valuation of $2.2 billion. The company focuses on creating products designed to help websites manage the rising tide of bot traffic, particularly from AI agents.
This Series C funding round was spearheaded by AVP, with contributions from existing investors such as Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures, and Tera Ventures. Roi Carthy, the executive chairman of Blackwall, mentioned that this latest funding round has quadrupled the company’s valuation since its last investment round in 2025.
In recent years, companies providing web infrastructure, including Cloudflare, Akamai, Imperva, and Blackwall, have found themselves in a challenging yet lucrative environment. They are confronted with numerous issues, such as DDoS attacks, unauthorized data scraping, botnet activities, and a surge of rogue AI agents. Despite the complications, there are ample opportunities for these companies to offer valuable solutions to hosting providers and websites facing unwanted traffic.
Unlike many industry competitors, Blackwall is not focused on selling its platform directly to websites. Instead, the company adopts a “channel” strategy, collaborating with web hosting services, managed service providers, and cloud platforms to assess their requirements. Blackwall then provides a customized set of tools that these providers can brand and offer to their clients, allowing them to maintain control over their customer relationships.
This approach is advantageous for both parties. Co-founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg explained that hosting services can mix various security features to create tailored solutions for their customers, set pricing, and share revenue with Blackwall. Initially, Blackwall offers a free tier that identifies traffic and threats affecting the network, but it charges for protective measures and tools to mitigate these threats.
In addition to features like threat intelligence, DDoS protection, and traffic routing, Blackwall analyzes web traffic for its clients to distinguish between genuine visitors, legitimate AI agents, and harmful bots. Rozenberg noted that the company employs digital fingerprinting techniques to recognize the software generating requests—such as Microsoft Office or Codex—to filter out malicious bots. Moreover, Blackwall utilizes its own AI models at client endpoints to assess the intentions and behaviors of incoming requests, differentiating between legitimate user requests and harmful bot activities.
Looking ahead, Rozenberg perceives significant opportunities as AI agents become more integrated into interactions with websites on behalf of users. This progression will likely necessitate systems capable of managing access for these agents, including how they are authorized to make transactions.
Blackwall is not the only player noticing this trend. Cloudflare has introduced an AI Crawl Control feature that allows website owners to regulate access for specific AI crawlers, even providing options to charge them for entry. However, Rozenberg asserts that Blackwall’s strength lies in enabling hosting providers to deliver these traffic management services themselves, rather than passing along the customer relationship to another security service.
The company intends to use the new funding to grow its presence in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East, while also developing enhanced security tools tailored for hosting, cloud, and managed service providers.
