The key facts

  • Blackwall raised $100 million at a $2.2 billion valuation — 4 times higher than its 2025 round; the round was led by AVP with participation from Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures.
  • The company works through hosting and cloud providers, who sell its protection tools under their own brand and share revenue.
  • Growth in bot traffic volumes and AI agent activity is a key market driver, where Cloudflare, Akamai and Imperva also operate.

Series C and valuation growth

Estonian company Blackwall, which builds web traffic protection tools for hosting providers, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $100 million at a $2.2 billion valuation. The Series C round was led by AVP, joined by existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures. Executive chairman of the company Roi Carthy told TechCrunch that the valuation has quadrupled compared with the previous funding round in 2025.

A market on the front line of the bot war

In recent years, infrastructure companies — Cloudflare, Akamai, Imperva and Blackwall — have found themselves in a valuable but difficult position: they are on the front line fending off DDoS attacks, indiscriminate scraping, botnets, malicious requests and, more recently, 'misbehaving' swarms of AI agents. At the same time, this is an opportunity to earn money by helping hosting providers and websites deal with potentially unwanted traffic.

A partner model instead of direct sales

Blackwall does not compete directly with market leaders and does not sell its platform to websites. The company uses a 'channel' approach: it works with hosting providers, managed service providers and cloud companies, handing them a customizable set of tools. Providers offer these tools to their customers under their own brand, keeping control over the relationships with them. Co-founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg said that hosting providers can combine security components, set prices themselves and share part of the revenue with Blackwall. Customers first get a free tier with an overview of traffic and threats, while protection and tools to address them require payment.

How traffic filtering works

In addition to threat intelligence, certificate management, DDoS protection and traffic routing, Blackwall analyzes customers' web traffic, distinguishing real visitors and legitimate AI agents from malicious bots and violators. The company uses digital fingerprints to identify the software sending a request (for example, Microsoft Office or Codex), as well as its own AI models deployed on customers' endpoints that assess the intent and behavior of requests — to distinguish an agent acting on a person's behalf from a malicious bot.

Betting on AI agents and plans

Rozenberg sees a big opportunity in AI agents beginning to interact with websites and make transactions on behalf of users: systems will be needed to determine which agents get access, on what terms, and how they can authorize payments. Cloudflare already offers AI Crawl Control, which allows website owners to allow or block individual AI crawlers and charge them for access, but Rozenberg believes Blackwall's advantage is that hosting providers can offer such services themselves, without ceding the customer relationship to a third-party security vendor. The company will use the raised funds to expand in North America, Europe, the Asia-Pacific region and the Middle East, as well as to develop new security tools for hosting, cloud and managed service providers.