Blackwall quadruples its valuation to $2.2bn as bots take over the web

Blackwall co-founders Denis Prochko (left) and Nikita Rozenberg. Credit: Blackwall “Blackwall has built something rare: a security company that grows with the internet itself,” said Warda Shaheen, a general partner at AVP. “It is already the layer in front of millions of websites, and as more of the web’s traffic comes from agents, the company in that position becomes indispensable.” AVP has led a $100 million funding round in Blackwall, the company announced on Tuesday. The round values the Estonian firm at $2.2 billion. Existing backers Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures also took part.

The raise quadruples Blackwall’s valuation. Executive chairman Roi Carthy told TechCrunch it is four times the level of the company’s last round, in 2025. It also lands just weeks after Blackwall became Estonia’s newest unicorn, joining other Estonian unicorns. Blackwall says the deal makes it Europe’s most valuable cybersecurity scaleup.

That title is contested. Tech Funding News notes that Exein claimed it too, at a $1.7 billion valuation. Built inside the web’s hosts Blackwall does not sell to websites directly. It works through web hosting, cloud and managed service providers, which bundle its tools into their own services.

The platform covers bot mitigation, DDoS protection, web application firewalls, load balancing and encryption. It filters billions of requests a day. The company started as BotGuard. Co-founder Denis Prochko built a recipe site that drew floods of automated traffic, crowding out real visitors.

He and chief executive Nikita Rozenberg turned the fix into a product. Betting on the agentic web The pitch rests on one shift. More of the web’s traffic now comes from software, not people. Much of it is now mostly bots, and Imperva puts them at 53% of all traffic, Tech Funding News reported.

Regulators are already tracking rogue AI agents as the volume climbs. “A tsunami of agents will overwhelm infrastructure optimised for human traffic,” said Norman Fiore, a general partner at Dawn Capital. Blackwall is not alone. Cloudflare lets site owners charge AI crawlers for access. Rivals DataDome and Netacea have raised smaller rounds.

Blackwall argues its edge is distribution, because the hosting provider owns the customer. The money arrives as European cybersecurity funding climbs. The sector raised 1.3 billion euros across 64 rounds in the first half of 2026, up about 125% on a year earlier, Tech Funding News reported. Blackwall will use the cash to expand into 12 regions across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East.

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