Blackwall, an Estonian company that sells web security through hosting providers, has raised $100 million in a Series C at a $2.2 billion valuation, TechCrunch reported on 20 October. AVP led the round, and existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures took part. The valuation is four times what it was at the company’s 2025 fundraise, executive chairman Roi Carthy said in comments to TechCrunch.
The money is the smaller story. Blackwall does not sell to websites. It sells to web hosts, managed service providers and cloud providers, giving them a bundle of tools to customise and resell under their own brand. According to CEO and co-founder Nikita Rozenberg, those providers keep the customer relationship, choose their own prices, and pass part of what they earn back to Blackwall.
The entry point is free. A network can see what is hitting it at no charge, and Blackwall bills for anything that actually stops it. A host that watches the problem on a dashboard has an obvious reason to buy the fix.
The harder job is telling visitors apart. Blackwall says it screens its customers’ traffic to separate real people and legitimate AI agents from malicious bots and intruders. To spot the software behind a request, Rozenberg told TechCrunch, the company uses digital fingerprinting, citing Microsoft Office and Codex as examples. It also runs its own AI models at customer endpoints to judge the intent and behavior of requests, which is how it tries to tell an agent a person sent on a real errand from a hostile bot. TechCrunch’s report gives no accuracy figures for either method.
That changes what web security is for. For years the goal was keeping robots out. Now a site owner has to decide which robots are welcome, which are not, and on what terms, because some AI agents are a customer’s own assistant and others are scrapers. Nobody has settled the rules for that, and the answer will differ from one site to the next.
Rozenberg expects the stakes to rise. He predicts a big opportunity as AI agents start transacting with websites for their users, which would call for rules on which agents are admitted, what terms apply, and how an agent gets authority to pay. That is a forecast. Nothing in TechCrunch’s report says Blackwall has built such a system.
Rivals are already working the same ground. Cloudflare, which competes in this market alongside Akamai and Imperva, offers AI Crawl Control: site owners can permit or refuse specific AI crawlers one by one, and can charge them a fee to get in. Rozenberg’s answer is that Blackwall lets hosting providers run this kind of traffic management themselves, so the customer relationship never passes to a separate security vendor. That is his argument, and the report offers no independent evidence on how well it holds.
TechCrunch describes these infrastructure companies as “on the frontlines” against scraping, botnet farms and “swarms of AI agents going rogue,” and as holding “a chance to make a killing.” That is the publication’s view. Its claim that bot traffic is skyrocketing comes without a figure, and Blackwall has not disclosed revenue, customer counts, or the share of its traffic that is bots.
The funds will go toward expansion in the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America, plus more tools for the hosts and cloud providers it sells through.
For any hosting company, the decision ahead is whether to build bot policy in-house, buy it from a reseller program like this one, or let a security giant own the customer. A $2.2 billion price tag puts a number on the middle option.
Reported by TechCrunch (Ram Iyer), 20 October 2026.
