Blackwall Raises $100 Million and Is Now Valued at $2.2 Billion
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The more A.I. bots roam the web, the more a bouncer is worth: The Estonian cybersecurity start-up Blackwall has raised $100 million (about €89 million) in a Series C, TechCrunch reports. The company is now valued at $2.2 billion (about €1.96 billion), four times its valuation in its previous round.
AVP Leads the Round
The round is led by the investor AVP, with existing backers Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures participating again. As recently as March 2025, the company, then still called BotGuard, closed a €45 million Series B and renamed itself Blackwall. Blackwall was founded by its chief executive, Nikita Rozenberg, and Denis Prochko; Roi Carthy is executive chairman.
Blackwall plans to use the fresh money to expand in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East and to develop additional security tools. The company does not disclose figures on revenue, customers or employees. At the end of September, the Estonian TopTech ranking had already valued Blackwall at around €1 billion based on a revenue estimate, naming it the country’s newest unicorn.
A Bouncer for Web Hosts
Blackwall filters the traffic that hits websites. The company separates real visitors and legitimate A.I. agents from malicious bots, scrapers and attackers. To do so, it uses digital fingerprinting to identify the software behind a request and its own A.I. models to assess what that software is trying to do. It also offers DDoS protection, certificate management and traffic routing.
What sets it apart is its business model: Blackwall does not sell directly to website operators, but to hosting, cloud and managed service providers. They bundle the tools with their own offerings under their own brand, set prices themselves and share the revenue with Blackwall. Customers get a free version that shows traffic and threats and pay for the actual protection.
Cloudflare and Others as Rivals
A.I. has made the problem much bigger. Agents that visit websites on behalf of users, collect data or soon also shop often behave unpredictably and put a strain on servers. Mr. Rozenberg expects that websites will increasingly need to control precisely which agents get access, on what terms, and how they are allowed to pay.
The industry’s heavyweights are also targeting this market. Cloudflare offers AI Crawl Control, a tool that lets website operators allow, block or charge individual A.I. crawlers, and Akamai and Imperva are also in the game. According to Mr. Rozenberg, Blackwall does not want to compete with them head-on and points out that its model lets hosting providers keep the customer relationship.
