Blackwall raises $100M at a $2.2B valuation as bots and AI agents crowd the web

Estonia-based Blackwall, which builds web-traffic security tools for hosting providers, said Tuesday it had raised $100 million at a $2.2 billion valuation. The Series C was led by AVP, with participation from existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures. According to executive chairman Roi Carthy, the round quadrupled the company's valuation compared with its previous raise in 2025.

Infrastructure companies like Cloudflare, Akamai, Imperva and Blackwall have found themselves on the front line against DDoS attacks, indiscriminate scraping, botnet farms and malicious requests — and lately swarms of AI agents going rogue. It is a hard but lucrative beat: helping websites and hosts fend off unwanted traffic pays well.

Betting on the middlemen

Blackwall isn't trying to take on the giants head-on. Rather than selling its platform directly to websites, it uses a "channel" approach: it studies the needs of hosting, cloud and managed-service providers and hands them a bundle of tools to customize. Those providers then offer the protection to their own clients under their own branding, keeping control of the relationship.

There's money in it for both sides. Co-founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg said hosts can mix and match components to build their own solution, set prices and share a cut of revenue with Blackwall. A free tier showing the traffic and threats hitting a network comes at no cost, while protection and remediation tools are paid.

Telling humans from bots

Beyond threat intelligence, certificate management, DDoS protection and traffic routing, Blackwall inspects requests to separate real visitors and legitimate AI agents from malicious bots. It uses digital fingerprinting to identify the software sending a request — Microsoft Office or Codex, for instance — and runs its own AI models at the customer's endpoint to gauge the intent and behavior of incoming traffic.

Rozenberg sees a big opportunity emerging as AI agents begin interacting and transacting with websites on users' behalf. That will eventually require systems to decide which agents get access, on what terms, and how they are authorized to make payments.

Blackwall isn't alone in eyeing that space. Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control lets site owners allow or block individual AI crawlers and even charge them for access. But Rozenberg argues Blackwall's edge is letting hosting providers offer such traffic management themselves, rather than handing the customer relationship to another security vendor.

Blackwall plans to use the funding to expand across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, and to build more security tooling for hosting, cloud and managed-service providers.

Source: TechCrunch