Blackwall raises $100M at $2.2B valuation to hold back the AI bot flood

• Who: Blackwall, an Estonia-based web traffic security company (formerly BotGuard), co-founded by Nikita Rozenberg (CEO) and Denis Prochko.
• What: a $100 million Series C at a $2.2 billion valuation, led by AVP, with existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures participating.
• When: announced October 20, 2026 — quadruple the company's valuation at its March 2025 Series B.
• Product: bot mitigation, DDoS protection, web application firewall, load balancing, server-side encryption and agentic AI traffic management, sold through hosting, cloud and managed-service providers as white-label bundles; flagship product GateKeeper.
• Scale: filters billions of requests per day for millions of websites, per Tech Funding News.
• Use of funds: expand into 12 strategic regions across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, plus new traffic-security products for the hosting market.

Estonia-based Blackwall, which builds web traffic security tools for hosting providers, announced Tuesday it has raised $100 million in a Series C funding round at a $2.2 billion valuation. The round was led by AVP, with participation from existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures. Executive chairman Roi Carthy told TechCrunch the new valuation is four times what the company was worth at its previous fundraise in March 2025.

A $2.2 billion bet on the web's bot problem

Blackwall sells on the front lines of a problem that has quietly exploded: the skyrocketing volume of automated web traffic. Alongside DDoS attacks, indiscriminate scraping and botnet farms, infrastructure companies now face swarms of AI agents going rogue. Blackwall's stack spans bot mitigation, DDoS protection, a web application firewall, load balancing, server-side encryption and management of agentic AI traffic, which the company says is rapidly taking over the internet.

Its flagship product, GateKeeper, inspects incoming traffic and filters malicious bots, application-layer distributed denial-of-service attacks and brute-force login attempts before they reach client applications. The broader platform, per SiliconANGLE, also includes firewalls, load balancing and optimization tools that distinguish legitimate AI traffic from potential attackers.

The channel play

Blackwall deliberately does not compete with Cloudflare, Akamai or Imperva for website owners' business. Instead it sells through a "channel" model: web hosting, managed service and cloud providers buy customizable bundles of its tools and offer them to their own customers under their own branding, keeping control of the relationship and sharing revenue with Blackwall. Co-founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg said hosting companies can mix and match the security tools to build solutions for their end customers.

"The web is becoming more automated, more distributed and more complex, but the infrastructure that powers it remains highly fragmented," Rozenberg said. "Our ambition is to build the traffic management ecosystem that brings those worlds together. This funding allows us to expand globally, deepen our platform and give hosting and infrastructure providers the technology they need to participate in the next generation of the web," Rozenberg said.

From BotGuard to Blackwall

Rozenberg and co-founder Denis Prochko started the company, then called BotGuard, after a recipe website Prochko built drew unwanted automated traffic that crowded out real visitors, Tech Funding News reports. The company renamed to Blackwall in March 2025 alongside its Series B — a reference to Cyberpunk 2077, in which the Blackwall is a digital barrier protecting the Net from rogue artificial intelligences. Tech.eu reported last month that Blackwall had reached a €1 billion valuation, putting it in Estonia's unicorn club weeks before this round.

Where the money goes

The company says the new financing will scale its global presence across 12 strategic regions spanning North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, and fund new traffic-security products for the hosting market — tools that let hosting, cloud and managed-service providers address a broader share of their customers' traffic-management needs through a single infrastructure layer.

With AI agents set to make automated traffic a permanent feature of the web, the investors betting on Blackwall — AVP, Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures — are betting that the hosting industry, not individual site owners, will pay for the filters. At $2.2 billion, Blackwall says it is now Europe's most valuable cybersecurity scaleup, though that title is contested: Exein has made the same claim at a $1.7 billion valuation.