Blackwall Quadruples Valuation to $2.2B as Websites Grapple with an Increasingly Crowded Internet
Estonia-based Blackwall, which builds web traffic security tools for hosting providers, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $100 million at a $2.2 billion valuation. The company develops products that help websites contend with the skyrocketing volume of bot traffic, particularly from AI agents.
The Series C round was led by AVP, with participation from existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures, and Tera Ventures. Roi Carthy, Blackwall's executive chairman, told TechCrunch that the round increased the company's valuation fourfold since its previous fundraise in 2025.
A Valuable but Difficult Space
Over the past few years, web infrastructure companies such as Cloudflare, Akamai, Imperva, and Blackwall have found themselves in an increasingly valuable but challenging position. They operate on the frontlines, dealing with DDoS attacks, indiscriminate scraping, botnet farms, malicious requests, and—in 2026—even swarms of AI agents going rogue. Yet this also presents a significant opportunity to profit by helping hosting providers and websites manage all the potentially unwanted traffic.
A Channel-First Approach
Blackwall, however, is not interested in competing with the major players in its space. Instead of selling its platform directly to websites, the company uses a channel approach: it works with web hosting, managed service, and cloud providers to understand their needs, then supplies a bundle of tools that they can customize. These providers can offer Blackwall's security tools to their own clients under their own branding while retaining control of the customer relationship.
The model benefits both sides. Co-founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg told TechCrunch that hosting companies can mix and match security components to build their own solutions according to what they want to offer end customers, set their own prices, and share a cut of the revenue with Blackwall. The company initially provides customers with a free tier that shows the traffic and threats hitting their network, but charges for protection or tools to address those threats.
Differentiating Legitimate Traffic from Malicious Bots
In addition to services such as threat intelligence, certificate management, DDoS protection, and traffic routing, Blackwall examines its customers' web traffic to distinguish actual visitors and legitimate AI agents from malicious bots, intruders, and disruptive traffic. Rozenberg said the company uses techniques like digital fingerprinting to identify the software sending a request—for example, Microsoft Office or Codex—to filter out bots. It also deploys its own AI models at customers' endpoints to analyze the intent and behavior of incoming requests, differentiating agents sent by a person for a genuine request from malicious bots.
The Coming Agent Economy
In the coming years, Rozenberg sees a major opportunity emerging as AI agents begin interacting and transacting with websites on behalf of their users. This will eventually require systems to manage which agents get access, on what terms, and how they are authorized to make payments.
Blackwall is not alone in eyeing that opportunity. Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control lets website owners allow or block individual AI crawlers, with an option to charge them for access. Rozenberg, however, argues that Blackwall's advantage lies in letting hosting providers offer such traffic management services themselves instead of handing the customer relationship to another security provider.
Expansion Plans
Blackwall plans to use the funding to expand its operations across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East, and to develop more security tooling for hosting, cloud, and managed service providers.
via TechCrunch