Blackwall

Cybersecurity · Web Infrastructure · Bot Mitigation

Funding

Blackwall raises $100M Series C at $2.2B to tame AI bot traffic

Instead of chasing Cloudflare and Akamai's customers directly, it sells its filtering tools wholesale to the hosting providers that already serve them.

• Blackwall raised $100 million in a Series C led by AVP at a $2.2 billion valuation, with existing backers Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures also participating.
• Founded in Estonia as BotGuard after co-founder Denis Prochko's recipe website got overrun by bots, Blackwall now embeds its traffic filtering inside hosting, cloud and managed service providers, who resell it under their own brand.
• The platform covers bot mitigation, DDoS protection, web application firewalls, load balancing, server-side encryption and detection of agentic AI traffic, filtering billions of requests a day across millions of sites.
• The $2.2B valuation is four times what Blackwall was worth after its $49.2M Series B just 19 months earlier, in March 2025.
• Blackwall had already crossed $1B in valuation weeks before this round, according to Tech.eu, making the Series C an expansion of unicorn status rather than a first billion-dollar mark.
• Blackwall calls itself Europe's most valuable cybersecurity scaleup, a title also claimed by Exein, which was valued at $1.7 billion.
• The funding will expand Blackwall's operations into 12 regions across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East and fund new traffic-security products for hosting partners.
• As AI agents increasingly browse and transact on behalf of users, distinguishing legitimate automated traffic from malicious bots is becoming core infrastructure for the entire hosting industry, not just a niche security add-on.