EDITION OF OCTOBER 20, 2026
Blackwall raises funds to filter traffic from bots and AI agents
Blackwall announces a $100 million funding round for its security tools for hosting providers. Its distribution model and filtering features illustrate the commercial stakes of controlling bots and AI agents, without demonstrating the effectiveness of their detection.
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Traffic from AI agents raises a practical question for websites: which requests should they accept and which should they block? Blackwall’s announced funding highlights the role of hosting providers in this filtering. The company aims to supply them with tools they can market under their own brands.
Blackwall, an Estonian company specializing in web traffic security, has announced that it raised $100 million at a valuation of $2.2 billion, TechCrunch reports on October 20. The funding supports a business at the intersection of website protection and the control of automated requests, including those from AI agents.
The funding round is led by AVP, with participation from existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures. According to Roi Carthy, Blackwall’s executive chairman, quoted by TechCrunch, the valuation has quadrupled since the previous funding round in 2025. This increase provides information about the terms of the announced financing; it does not measure the products’ technical performance.
The company distributes its tools through hosting providers, managed service providers and cloud companies. These partners can customize the components, offer them under their own brands and maintain the commercial relationship with their customers. According to Nikita Rozenberg, co-founder and chief executive, they set their own prices and pass a share of revenue to Blackwall.
The offering starts with a free tier that provides visibility into traffic and threats. Protection features are paid. The catalog includes threat intelligence, certificate management, protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks and traffic routing.
To distinguish visitors, legitimate agents and malicious requests, Blackwall says it combines software fingerprints with its own AI models deployed at customer sites. According to its chief executive, these models analyze the intent and behavior of requests. However, the article provides no independent tests with which to assess the reliability of this distinction or any potential errors.
The commercial stakes can therefore be understood as delegating access control to hosting providers: they gain additional services to sell while retaining control of their customer relationships. This interpretation remains separate from the technical promise, which would require detection and false-positive measurements to assess.
Blackwall plans to use the funds to expand its operations in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, and to develop its tools. These destinations represent an announced investment program and do not establish that the expansion has already taken place.