Blackwall raises $100 million amid bot traffic growth

The Estonia-based security company hit a $2.2 billion valuation after a Series C, as hosting providers face rising bot traffic and AI agents.

Blackwall has raised $100 million in a Series C round, giving the Estonia-based company a $2.2 billion valuation. The startup builds security tools for hosting providers, helping websites handle a growing wave of bot traffic, including requests from AI agents. As IT-PUB News reports, the funding comes as web infrastructure companies face mounting pressure to manage unwanted automated traffic. It also underlines how AI-driven activity is adding another layer to an already crowded and often hostile online environment.

Blackwall’s valuation jumps fourfold

The Series C was led by AVP, with participation from existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures. Blackwall executive chairman Roi Carthy said the new round lifted the company’s valuation by four times compared with its previous fundraise in 2025.

That jump puts Blackwall in a fast-growing but difficult part of the market. Companies in this segment are expected to protect websites and online services from DDoS attacks, scraping, botnet activity, malicious requests and now rising volumes of AI agent traffic.

For Blackwall, the funding is not just about expansion. It is also a sign that traffic management and web security are becoming more valuable as businesses try to separate legitimate visitors from automated systems that can overload or abuse their services.

Blackwall bets on hosting partners, not direct sales

Blackwall is not trying to compete directly with major security vendors by selling straight to websites. Instead, it uses a channel model, working with web hosting, managed service and cloud providers.

In that setup, Blackwall studies what those providers need and gives them a set of tools they can customize. The providers then offer the security products to their own customers under their own branding, while keeping control of the customer relationship.

According to co-founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg, that approach lets hosting companies build their own solution from different security components, choose how to price it and share revenue with Blackwall. The company starts with a free tier that shows traffic and threats reaching a network, then charges for protection and other tools that respond to those threats.

That matters because it shifts who stays visible to the customer. Rather than becoming the public face of the service, Blackwall is aiming to stay in the background while hosting providers fold the offering into their own business.

Blackwall tries to sort people, bots and AI agents

Blackwall’s products go beyond basic blocking. The company says it offers threat intelligence, certificate management, DDoS protection and traffic routing, while also analyzing web traffic to distinguish real visitors, legitimate AI agents, malicious bots and other disruptive requests.

Rozenberg said the company uses techniques such as digital fingerprinting to identify the software behind a request, including examples like Microsoft Office or Codex. Blackwall also uses its own AI models at customer endpoints to study the intent and behavior of incoming requests, with the goal of telling apart a person’s agent making a legitimate request from a malicious bot.

That distinction is becoming more important as websites receive more traffic from automated systems. For businesses, the challenge is not just volume but intent: not every automated request is harmful, and not every automated request should be trusted.

The issue could become even more important as AI agents begin interacting with websites on behalf of users. Rozenberg sees a future in which websites need systems that decide which agents can access services, under what conditions and whether they are allowed to make payments.

Blackwall sees room to grow as AI traffic rises

Blackwall is not alone in trying to address that shift. Cloudflare already offers AI Crawl Control, which lets website owners allow or block individual AI crawlers and, in some cases, charge for access.

Rozenberg argues that Blackwall’s advantage lies elsewhere: instead of moving the customer relationship to a separate security provider, it lets hosting providers offer traffic management services themselves. That could make the tools easier to package into existing hosting or cloud offerings.

The company plans to use the new funding to expand in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. It also plans to build more security tools for hosting, cloud and managed service providers.

For websites and the companies that host them, the broader direction is hard to miss. As bot traffic grows and AI agents become more active online, traffic security is becoming a more central part of how internet services are managed and monetized.