Blackwall, the Estonian cybersecurity firm that started life as BotGuard, has closed a $100 million funding round that pushes its valuation to $2.2 billion, according to the company's announcement this week. The raise officially makes Blackwall one of the most valuable cybersecurity startups in Europe and secures its place among the continent's unicorns.
Founded in Tallinn in 2019, the company has now closed three significant funding rounds in roughly two years. The entire capital raised will go toward expanding its global web traffic management platform.
What Blackwall Does, and Why It Matters Now
Blackwall builds cybersecurity solutions aimed primarily at hosting providers and website operators, with a particular focus on small and medium-sized businesses. Its core speciality is protecting servers and data from bot-generated traffic, especially malicious bots that flood web infrastructure with fake browsing data, disrupt site performance, and open the door to scraping attacks.
The scale of the problem is striking. According to Cloudflare Radar data, bot-generated traffic now accounts for 57.5% of all global internet traffic, encompassing known bot types, AI agents, and search engine crawlers. Human traffic sits at just 42.5%. Agentic AI is on a clear trajectory toward dominating internet activity entirely.
For SMBs, the threat is especially acute. Unlike large enterprises with dedicated security budgets, smaller businesses struggle to afford enterprise-grade defenses. That leaves them exposed when bot swarms or uncontrolled AI agents launch sustained attacks, including layer-7 DDoS assaults capable of knocking a website offline for hours at a time.
Blackwall operates firmly in the deep tech sector, an area seeing rapid growth across Europe, and the company is directing increasing attention toward AI agents as an emerging threat category that demands dedicated infrastructure-level responses.
GateKeeper: The Product at Blackwall's Core
Blackwall's flagship product is GateKeeper, a real-time traffic inspection engine that uses AI to scan and filter malicious requests before they reach application backends. GateKeeper is built to anticipate threats rather than merely react to them, with particular effectiveness against layer-7 DDoS attacks, the kind that can paralyze a business's web communications for extended periods.
The solution works invisibly to end users. It runs autonomously, requiring minimal configuration from operators, and covers threat intelligence, certificate management, DDoS protection, and traffic routing in a single automated stack.
One structural feature sets Blackwall apart from most cybersecurity vendors: it does not sell directly to businesses. Instead, Blackwall works through a network of intermediaries, specifically hosting providers, managed service providers, and e-commerce platforms that want to differentiate their offering by embedding Blackwall's protection natively. The model is channel-first, not direct B2B.
“Internet Is No Longer Human”: The Warning Behind the Raise
Blackwall was founded by CEO Nik Rozenberg, an Israeli software engineer who studied at Saint Petersburg State University, and CTO Denis Prochko, a Russian computer scientist with a background in cybersecurity and banking software. The two met in Tallinn, found immediate alignment on their vision of where the internet was heading, and built first Plainkit, a software framework company, before pivoting to BotGuard and then rebranding to Blackwall.
Their diagnosis of the market is blunt. In the post announcing the latest funding round, Blackwall wrote:
“By connecting providers, infrastructure, and technologies, we aim to deliver greater control over how internet traffic is managed, protected, and monetized. We want to address the growing needs of those who must deal daily with automated and agentic AI traffic.”
The company's public statement went further on the structural shift underway:
“The internet is no longer human. AI is rapidly taking over, creating a reality where bots account for more than half of all web traffic. What is even more alarming is that 66% of this bot activity is malicious. We are certain that when non-commercial traffic and automated scraping loads consume a growing share of server cycles, operating margins erode silently. We want to give providers solutions that can eliminate the hidden tax on infrastructure.”
The statistic Blackwall cites deserves attention: if 57.5% of internet traffic is bot-driven, as Cloudflare Radar reports, and 66% of that bot activity is malicious, then roughly one in three internet requests reaching any given server today is actively harmful. For SMBs absorbing that load without dedicated defenses, the operational cost is real and largely invisible on a standard P&L.
What European Cybersecurity Investors Are Watching
The $100 million raise positions Blackwall among a small group of European deep tech companies achieving unicorn status in a sector that the EU has flagged as strategically critical. As AI model capacity continues to expand at pace, the volume and sophistication of automated traffic will only increase, and that arithmetic favors companies like Blackwall that have built their entire architecture around the bot-first reality of modern internet infrastructure.
Investors and hosting providers across the UK, DACH, and Benelux markets should watch Blackwall's channel expansion closely. The company's intermediary-led model means its growth will show up in partner announcements rather than direct enterprise deals. The next signal to track is whether the $100 million capital is deployed toward geographic expansion in Western Europe or toward deepening AI-specific threat detection capabilities, since both represent meaningful inflection points for the platform's competitive positioning heading into 2026.
