Blackwall raises $100m at a $2.2bn valuation to manage the web's bot and AI agent traffic
The Estonia-based company, which sells through hosting providers rather than to websites directly, says the round quadruples its valuation from 2025.
Blackwall, an Estonia-based company that builds web traffic security and management tools for hosting providers, has raised $100 million in a Series C round at a $2.2 billion valuation, it announced on 20 October 2026. The round was led by AVP, with participation from existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures.
Executive chairman Roi Carthy told TechCrunch that the round increased Blackwall's valuation fourfold since its previous fundraise in 2025.
What Blackwall does
Blackwall sits in front of websites and decides which traffic gets through. Its platform covers bot mitigation, DDoS protection, a web application firewall, load balancing, server-side encryption and the management of traffic from AI agents, according to Tech.eu. It runs inside hosting providers' own infrastructure, separating real visitors and legitimate automated traffic from malicious bots and attacks, and filters billions of requests per day.
Co-founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg told TechCrunch that the company uses techniques such as digital fingerprinting to identify the software sending a request, and runs its own AI models at customers' endpoints to analyse the intent and behaviour of incoming requests. The goal is to tell an agent sent by a person for a real task apart from a malicious bot.
A channel model instead of a fight with Cloudflare
Blackwall does not sell directly to websites. It works with web hosting, managed service and cloud providers, which bundle its tools, sell them to their own customers under their own brand, set the prices and share a cut of the revenue with Blackwall, TechCrunch reported. Providers get a free tier that shows the traffic and threats hitting their network, and pay for protection.
That positioning is the core of the pitch. Tech.eu describes hosting as a $200 billion, fragmented market, because infrastructure has to stay close to the businesses it serves. Unlike hyperscale and content-delivery platforms that compete with providers for the same customers, Blackwall says it strengthens the provider's own relationship with the businesses it hosts. TechCrunch noted that Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control already lets site owners allow, block or charge AI crawlers; Rozenberg argues Blackwall's edge is letting hosting providers offer such services themselves.
"The web is becoming more automated, more distributed and more complex, but the infrastructure that powers it remains highly fragmented," Rozenberg said. "Our ambition is to build the traffic management ecosystem that brings those worlds together."
Why investors are betting on agent traffic
The investors' case rests on the rise of AI agents browsing and transacting on behalf of users. "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. That's why we're leading this round," said Warda Shaheen, general partner at AVP.
Norman Fiore, general partner at Dawn Capital, put it more bluntly: "A tsunami of agents will overwhelm infrastructure optimised for human traffic."
Blackwall plans to use the money to establish and expand operations across 12 regions spanning North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, and to build more security tooling for hosting, cloud and managed service providers.
Estonia's second new unicorn in two weeks
The round also has a national angle. Estonian public broadcaster ERR reported that Tera Ventures, an Estonia-linked VC, made its first investment of about $300,000 in Blackwall six years ago. Founding partner Stanislav Ivanov said he believed Tera took part in two further rounds before the company started raising capital in London. Blackwall is the second Estonian company to reach unicorn status in two weeks, after Skeleton Technologies' Siemens-led round.
"Skeleton and Blackwall. Estonia now has 12 unicorns in total and I think that's more per capita than any other country in the world," Doris Põld, CEO of the Estonian Association of Information Technology and Telecommunications (ITL), told ERR.
What it means for European founders and investors
Blackwall is a reminder that infrastructure for the AI era is not only about models and chips. As agents generate a growing share of web traffic, someone has to decide who gets in, on what terms and, eventually, how they pay. A European company that has built that layer through partners, rather than by competing with US giants head-on, has now been valued at more than $2 billion.
For founders, the channel strategy is the lesson: selling through hosting providers let Blackwall reach millions of websites without building a huge direct sales force. For investors, the round shows that early backing from a small regional fund can compound into a large stake in a global company, and that cybersecurity remains one of the sectors where European companies can reach scale. For context on where the money is flowing, see our analysis of European tech funding in Q3 2026.
Spotted an error? Email mladen@europreneursmedia.com and we'll correct it. See our corrections policy and editorial standards.
