Estonia-based Blackwall has raised US$100 million in a Series C round that values the company at US$2.2 billion, as reported by TechCrunch. The web traffic security specialist, which sells bot-filtering tools through hosting and cloud providers rather than directly to websites, said the round was led by AVP, with Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures all participating as returning backers.
Executive chairman Roi Carthy told TechCrunch the raise put Blackwall’s valuation at four times the level it reached during its previous fundraise in 2025. That prior round was a €45 million Series B led by Dawn Capital, reported at the time as approximately US$49.2 million, which TechCrunch covered in March 2025. The round places Blackwall in the same competitive space as Cloudflare, Akamai and Imperva in a market that has grown more contested as the volume and sophistication of automated web traffic has escalated.
A channel strategy built for hosting providers
Blackwall’s approach differs from those larger competitors in one structural way: it does not sell directly to the websites it ultimately protects. Instead, co-founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg described to TechCrunch a ‘channel’ model in which hosting companies, managed service providers and cloud operators take Blackwall’s security components, configure them to their own requirements, brand the resulting product as their own, and set their own prices. Blackwall shares in the revenue from those arrangements.
The company starts by giving hosting partners a free tier that shows the traffic and threats hitting their network, then charges for the protective tools themselves. Its flagship product, GateKeeper (a reverse proxy that inspects and analyses web traffic in real time) sits at the centre of the offering, according to a March 2025 TechCrunch report on the Series B round. Services layered around it include threat intelligence, certificate management, DDoS protection and traffic routing.
Rozenberg told TechCrunch the company uses techniques including digital fingerprinting to identify the software originating a request (distinguishing, for example, Microsoft Office from Codex) and runs its own AI models at customers’ endpoints to assess the intent and behaviour of incoming requests. The aim is to separate genuine visitors and legitimate AI agents from malicious bots and disruptive automated traffic.
The scale of the problem has grown sharply. According to Blackwall’s own figures, cited in March 2025 by Ellex Legal covering the Series B, approximately 50% of all global web traffic originates from bots, of which 66% is malicious. Small and medium-sized businesses, which Blackwall’s channel model is designed to reach through their hosting providers, are the target of 43% of all cyber-attacks, Blackwall has said.
AI agents and the next competitive front
Rozenberg sees a further commercial opening as AI agents begin conducting transactions on behalf of users. That shift, he argued, will eventually require systems to govern which agents gain access to a website, on what terms, and how they are authorised to make payments. Cloudflare has moved in the same direction with its AI Crawl Control product, which lets site owners allow or block individual AI crawlers and optionally charge for access. Rozenberg’s argument, as he presented it to TechCrunch, is that Blackwall’s advantage lies in letting hosting providers manage those relationships themselves rather than ceding control to a third-party security platform.
Blackwall plans to deploy the fresh capital to expand operations across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, and to develop additional security tooling for hosting, cloud and managed service providers. The company was founded in 2019 by Rozenberg and Denis Prochko, who serves as CTO, and is headquartered in Tallinn, according to Blackwall’s own Series B newsroom post.
