Estonia-based cybersecurity company Blackwall has raised $100 million at a $2.2 billion valuation as hosting providers face a growing problem: more of the traffic reaching websites is coming from automated systems rather than people.
TechCrunch reported that the Series C was led by AVP and valued Blackwall at $2.2 billion, with existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures also participating. The valuation is roughly four times the level reached in Blackwall’s previous financing.
AI agents are joining the existing bot problem
Blackwall sits in a part of internet infrastructure already dealing with DDoS attacks, scrapers, botnets and automated fraud.
The difference now is that not every machine making requests is necessarily hostile.
AI agents may browse websites, retrieve information or eventually conduct transactions on behalf of real users. That creates a harder security problem than simply separating humans from bots.
Blackwall describes itself as a security infrastructure company protecting web ecosystems from automated threats, with its technology used by hosting providers, cloud platforms and enterprise networks.
TechCrunch reported that the company uses techniques including digital fingerprinting and its own models to distinguish legitimate software and AI agents from malicious or disruptive traffic.
Blackwall is selling through the infrastructure layer
Founded in 2019 by Nik Rozenberg and Denis Prochko, Blackwall is headquartered in Tallinn and primarily sells through Hosting Service Providers and Managed Service Providers rather than trying to acquire individual websites one by one. Dawn Capital describes the company as providing web security & traffic filtering for hosting providers.
That distribution strategy matters because one hosting company can represent thousands of downstream websites.
Dawn says Blackwall’s technology has delivered a 30% improvement in malicious activity detection while cutting aftercare costs by 15–20%, figures supplied through its portfolio description of the company.
The new capital will support further expansion across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, alongside development of additional security tools for hosting, cloud and managed-service providers.
Websites may need identity systems for machines
The larger shift is more interesting than the funding round.
Web security historically assumed that automated traffic was something to detect and often block. AI agents complicate that assumption because websites may actually want some machines to visit, search and transact.
Cloudflare, Akamai and other infrastructure companies are already building controls around AI crawlers. Blackwall is betting that hosting providers will need comparable systems for deciding which automated visitors are legitimate, what they are permitted to do and when they should be stopped.
That turns bot management into something closer to machine identity and access control.
For founders and infrastructure teams, the web may therefore be entering an era where serving human customers is only half the traffic problem.
The other half will be deciding which machines deserve to be treated like customers too.
