Blackwall raises $100 million at a $2.2 billion valuation
The Estonia-based web-security company will use its Series C to expand bot, DDoS and AI-traffic management tools through hosting providers.
Why Blackwall is raising now
Blackwall has raised $100 million in a Series C round that values the Estonia-based web-traffic security company at $2.2 billion. AVP led the round, with existing backers Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures also participating.12
The new valuation is four times higher than Blackwall’s previous fundraise in 2025, according to the company’s executive chairman Roi Carthy in comments reported by TechCrunch.2 Blackwall says the money will fund expansion across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, alongside new security tools for hosting, cloud and managed-service providers.12
Blackwall sells its platform through service providers rather than competing directly for the relationship with each website. Hosting and cloud companies can combine its modules, set their own prices and offer protection under their own branding, while Blackwall takes a share of the resulting revenue.2 The company says its platform covers bot mitigation, DDoS protection, web-application firewalls, load balancing, server-side encryption and the management of agentic AI traffic.1
That last category is becoming a bigger part of the pitch. Websites are dealing with more automated requests from legitimate tools, aggressive scrapers, botnets and AI agents, and the difference between useful and unwanted traffic is not always obvious from a simple user-agent string. TechCrunch reports that Blackwall uses digital fingerprinting and endpoint AI models to assess whether requests represent a person’s intended task or malicious behaviour.2
Blackwall’s channel model is aimed at giving hosting providers more control over the commercial and technical response. A provider can offer a free traffic-visibility tier, then charge for protection features such as threat intelligence, certificate management, DDoS protection and traffic routing.2 The company says it is already deployed inside hosting infrastructure and protects millions of websites, while AVP describes the round as a step towards a global web-traffic management ecosystem.1
The wider market includes Cloudflare, Akamai and Imperva, all of which are also developing ways for websites to manage automated traffic. Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control, for example, lets site owners allow or block individual AI crawlers and can support paid access.2 Blackwall’s argument is that hosting providers should own that relationship rather than pass it to a separate security vendor.
Our opinion
Blackwall’s funding is notable less for the headline valuation than for what it says about the next phase of web infrastructure. AI agents are turning traffic management into a policy problem: sites need to know who is requesting access, what the request is trying to do and whether the operator should be allowed to proceed. Selling that control through hosting providers could be a sensible route to distribution, but it also puts a great deal of trust in how those providers classify legitimate automation.
The company now has to prove that its models can separate useful agents from abusive ones without adding friction for ordinary visitors or quietly blocking accessibility and research tools. The $100 million gives Blackwall room to expand; it does not, by itself, settle that difficult judgement call.12