Blackwall raises $100M at $2.2B valuation to help hosts filter AI agent traffic

Blackwall, an Estonia-based company that builds web traffic security tools for hosting providers, has raised $100 million at a $2.2 billion valuation. According to TechCrunch, which reported the news on Tuesday, the Series C round values the company at four times what it was worth at its previous fundraise in 2025.

The round

AVP led the investment, with existing backers Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures also participating. Blackwall's executive chairman, Roi Carthy, told TechCrunch that the new valuation represents a fourfold increase since the 2025 round, a jump that tracks the growing pressure on web infrastructure companies as they contend with DDoS attacks, indiscriminate scraping, botnets and, more recently, large volumes of AI agents hitting websites.

Selling through the channel, not to websites

Unlike Cloudflare, Akamai or Imperva, Blackwall does not sell its platform directly to website owners. Instead, it takes a channel approach: it works with web hosting, managed service and cloud providers, packages its tools for them, and lets those providers offer the security products to their own customers under their own branding.

Co-founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg told TechCrunch that hosting companies can assemble their own solution from Blackwall's components, set their own prices, and share revenue with Blackwall. The company offers a free tier that shows providers the traffic and threats hitting their networks, then charges for the tools that actually protect against those threats.

Telling legitimate agents from malicious bots

Beyond staples such as threat intelligence, certificate management, DDoS protection and traffic routing, Blackwall's core task is classification: separating real visitors and legitimate AI agents from malicious bots, intruders and disruptive traffic.

Rozenberg said the company uses digital fingerprinting to identify the software behind each request — citing Microsoft Office and Codex as examples — to filter out bots. It also runs its own AI models at customers' endpoints to analyse the intent and behaviour of incoming requests, distinguishing an agent acting on a genuine user's behalf from an automated attack.

Betting on the agent economy

Looking ahead, Rozenberg sees a larger opportunity as AI agents begin interacting and transacting with websites on behalf of people. That shift, he argues, will eventually require systems that manage which agents get access, on what terms, and how they are authorised to make payments.

Blackwall is not alone in eyeing that market. Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control already lets website owners allow or block individual AI crawlers, with an option to charge them for access. Rozenberg's counterargument is that Blackwall's advantage lies in letting hosting providers offer such traffic management themselves, rather than handing the customer relationship to an outside security vendor.

The company plans to spend the new funding expanding operations across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, and on developing additional security tooling for hosting, cloud and managed service providers.

Why it matters

The round is a measure of how quickly the economics of web traffic are changing. As AI agents and scrapers account for a growing share of requests, the infrastructure that decides who gets in — and on what terms — becomes strategically important rather than purely defensive.

Blackwall's model also points to a shift in how that market may be structured: rather than websites buying bot management from a standalone vendor, hosting providers could become the distribution channel for agent-access controls, keeping the end-customer relationship for themselves. A fourfold valuation increase in roughly a year suggests investors believe that traffic governance, including metering and monetising legitimate AI agents rather than simply blocking them, is a durable and expanding market.