Blackwall Reportedly Raises $100M at $2.2B Value

Estonia-based web security company Blackwall has raised $100 million at a $2.2 billion valuation, TechCrunch reported on 20 October 2026, citing the company. Blackwall builds tools that help hosting providers deal with the fast-growing volume of bot traffic, especially traffic from AI agents.

The Series C was led by AVP, with existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures taking part, according to TechCrunch. Executive chairman Roi Carthy told the outlet the round “increased the company’s valuation by 4 times since its previous fundraise in 2025”. No Blackwall press release was found, so the figures rest on the company’s statements to TechCrunch.

In brief

Blackwall said it raised a $100 million Series C at a $2.2 billion valuation, led by AVP, TechCrunch reports.
The company says its valuation has risen fourfold since its 2025 round, when it raised a €45 million Series B and rebranded from Botguard.
Blackwall sells through hosting, cloud and managed service providers, and says it uses fingerprinting and its own AI models to separate legitimate AI agents from malicious bots.

Selling through the hosts

Blackwall works in a crowded field alongside Cloudflare, Akamai and Imperva, TechCrunch notes, where companies face DDoS attacks, indiscriminate scraping, botnet farms and malicious requests. But Blackwall says it is not trying to compete head-on with them. Instead of selling directly to websites, it uses a “channel” approach, working with web hosting, managed service and cloud providers.

Those partners can offer Blackwall’s tools to their own customers under their own branding and keep control of that relationship. Co-founder and chief executive Nikita Rozenberg told TechCrunch that hosts can mix and match security components, set their own prices and share a cut of the revenue with Blackwall. The company offers a free tier that shows the traffic and threats hitting a network, then charges for protection.

Telling agents from bots

Alongside threat intelligence, certificate management, DDoS protection and traffic routing, Blackwall says it examines web traffic to tell real visitors and “legit AI agents” from malicious bots. Rozenberg told TechCrunch the company uses digital fingerprinting to identify the software sending a request, giving Microsoft Office or Codex as examples. It also runs its own AI models at customers’ endpoints to analyse the intent and behaviour of requests.

Rozenberg sees a bigger opportunity as AI agents start interacting and transacting with websites on users’ behalf. That will require systems to decide which agents get access, on what terms, and how they are authorised to make payments, he told the outlet. Rivals are moving too: TechCrunch points to Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control, which lets site owners allow, block or charge individual AI crawlers. Rozenberg argues Blackwall’s edge is letting hosts offer such services themselves.

From Botguard to Blackwall

The company was previously known as Botguard. In March 2025 it announced a €45 million Series B led by Dawn Capital, with existing investor MMC, and rebranded to Blackwall. That release described Blackwall as founded in 2019 by Rozenberg and chief technology officer Denis Prochko. It said Blackwall was then “deployed across more than 2.3 million websites and applications” and that its flagship product, GateKeeper, is a reverse proxy with bot and attack detection.

At the time, Blackwall said it would use the money to double headcount and expand in the US and Asia-Pacific. According to TechCrunch, the new funding will go towards expanding across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, and building more security tools for hosting, cloud and managed service providers.

Our read

A fourfold jump in valuation in about 18 months shows how quickly investors are pricing in the AI-agent traffic problem. Blackwall’s bet is that the hosting providers serving millions of small businesses will want their own branded answer rather than send customers to Cloudflare. The figures come from the company via TechCrunch, and the harder test is whether its agent-identification tools hold up as AI traffic, and attempts to disguise it, keep growing.