Blackwall Hits $2.2B Valuation With $100M Raise to Fight Bot and AI Traffic

TL;DR

• Blackwall has raised $100M at a $2.2B valuation, roughly quadrupling its prior valuation, to scale its bot management and AI-traffic filtering platform for website owners.
• The Estonian startup, formerly known as BotGuard, says AI scrapers and malicious bots now make up the majority of web traffic, driving demand from publishers, e-commerce sites, and hosting providers.
• Investors are betting the bot problem becomes core web infrastructure, positioning Blackwall as a challenger to Cloudflare and incumbents in application security.

Blackwall closed a $100M funding round that values the company at $2.2 billion, a fourfold jump from its last round and a milestone that cements its status as one of Europe's fastest-growing cybersecurity startups.

The round was driven by surging demand for tools that separate real human visitors from the flood of automated traffic now hitting the open web. The company said it will use the fresh capital to expand its engineering team in Tallinn and the U.S., scale its filtering network, and launch new products aimed specifically at AI crawlers and large language model scrapers.

Founded in Estonia in 2019 as BotGuard by entrepreneurs Nikita Rozenberg and Denis Prochko, Blackwall rebranded earlier this year as its ambitions grew beyond traditional bot mitigation. The startup now counts more than 2,500 hosting providers and over 3 million websites using its technology, often bundled through web hosts and managed service providers.

From Bot Protection to Web Traffic Control

What started as a lightweight bot filter for small and mid-sized websites has evolved into a full traffic management layer. Blackwall sits between a website and the public internet, analyzing every request in real time to block malicious bots, spam, DDoS attacks, and credential-stuffing attempts while allowing legitimate users and search engines through.

In recent months the company has added granular controls for AI-driven traffic. Site owners can now see which AI companies are scraping their content, how often, and for what purpose, and choose to block, rate-limit, or charge for access. That visibility has become a key selling point as publishers grow increasingly frustrated with their articles, images, and product listings being vacuumed up to train models without permission or payment.

The company says its edge is built for the long tail of the internet. Unlike enterprise-focused vendors that require complex integrations, Blackwall is distributed primarily through hosting partners like cPanel and CloudLinux ecosystems, giving it reach into millions of WordPress sites, e-commerce stores, and small business pages that often lack dedicated security teams.

Why Bots and AI Scrapers Are Breaking the Web

The timing of the raise reflects a stark shift in how the web works. Security researchers estimate that automated traffic now accounts for more than half of all internet activity, with AI scrapers causing a sharp spike over the past 18 months since generative AI tools went mainstream.

For publishers, the impact is twofold. First, infrastructure costs are soaring as bots consume bandwidth and overload servers, slowing load times for real readers. Second, business models are under threat as AI search summaries and chatbots answer queries directly, reducing clicks back to original sources while still using those sources for training and retrieval.

E-commerce and ticketing sites face a parallel problem with scalper bots, inventory hoarding, and fake accounts, while any public-facing site is seeing more aggressive credential-stuffing powered by AI automation.

Blackwall argues traditional CAPTCHAs and IP blocklists are no longer enough. Its system uses behavioral analysis, fingerprinting, and machine learning models trained on billions of requests per day to distinguish good bots from bad actors without adding friction for humans.

Why Investors Are Betting Big on Web Infrastructure

The $2.2B valuation signals renewed investor appetite for foundational web infrastructure, even in a selective late-stage funding market.

Venture firms have poured money into application security and bot management as AI makes attacks cheaper and more scalable. Investors see Blackwall's distribution model as a differentiator: by embedding with hosting providers, it can acquire customers at low cost and scale quickly, similar to how Cloudflare initially grew through self-serve adoption.

The startup's economics have also stood out. Blackwall says it has grown revenue more than 4x in the past two years while remaining capital-efficient, with its partner-led model driving strong net retention as customers upgrade from basic protection to premium filtering, analytics, and compliance tools.

While the company did not disclose the lead investor for the new round, previous backers include European VC funds Tera Ventures, Expeditions Fund, and Verte Capital. The new valuation puts Blackwall in direct competition with public giants like Cloudflare, Akamai, and Fastly, as well as private rivals like DataDome, Kasada, and Human Security.

What It Means for Publishers in a Crowded Internet

For publishers and creators, Blackwall's rise underscores a new reality: controlling access to your site is becoming as important as creating content itself.

The startup is pitching a future where every website has a traffic control dashboard - deciding which human audiences, search crawlers, and AI agents get in, at what speed, and on what terms. That includes emerging standards for opt-outs from AI training, pay-per-crawl models, and licensing deals where AI companies pay publishers for clean, structured access instead of scraping indiscriminately.

Media executives are watching closely. As ad revenue gets squeezed and AI-generated content floods search results, ensuring that real human traffic can reach fast-loading, secure pages is critical. Tools that can prove a visitor is human are also becoming important for advertisers who want to avoid paying for bot impressions.

Still, challenges remain. Over-blocking risks hurting SEO and accessibility, and the cat-and-mouse game with bot operators means filtering models must be constantly retrained. Blackwall will need to prove its technology can keep false positives low while handling increasingly sophisticated AI agents that mimic human browsing behavior almost perfectly.

What's Next for Blackwall

With $100M in fresh funding, Blackwall plans to double its headcount to more than 300 employees, open a larger go-to-market hub in the U.S., and invest heavily in research around agentic AI traffic.

The company is also exploring partnerships with content licensing platforms and CDN providers to make its AI-scraper controls a default part of web hosting. Longer term, CEO Rozenberg has said he sees an opportunity to build a marketplace for bot traffic, where verified AI developers can pay for API-style access to publisher content.

If that vision holds, the latest round may be less about blocking bots and more about re-architecting how value flows across the internet - with Blackwall positioning itself as the tollbooth in the middle.

AndroGuider Team

Articles written by the AndroGuider team. We try to make them thorough and informational while being easy to read.