- Blackwall raised $100M in a Series C led by AVP, valuing the company at $2.2 B.
- Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures also backed the round.
- It will expand into 12 regions as AI agents reshape web traffic.
Estonia-founded Blackwall has raised $100 million in a Series C round led by AVP, valuing the web security company at $2.2 billion. Existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures also participated.
The company says the valuation makes it Europe’s most valuable cybersecurity scaleup. That title is contested: Exein made the same claim at a $1.7 billion valuation.
Tech Funding News covered Blackwall’s €45 million round in March 2025. Against that round, the new valuation marks a steep jump in under two years
From a recipe site’s bot problem to a $2.2B valuation
Co-founders Nikita Rozenberg and Denis Prochko started the company, then called BotGuard, after a recipe website Prochko built drew unwanted automated traffic that crowded out real visitors.
Today Blackwall sells web security and traffic management to hosting, cloud and managed service providers, which embed its filtering in their own services. The platform combines bot mitigation, DDoS protection, web application firewalls, load balancing, server-side encryption and tools for managing agentic AI traffic. It filters billions of requests a day for millions of websites.
‘Our ambition is to build the traffic management ecosystem that brings those worlds together. This funding allows us to expand globally, deepen our platform and give hosting and infrastructure providers the technology they need to participate in the next generation of the web,’ said Rozenberg, Co-Founder and CEO of Blackwall.
The money will fund expansion into 12 strategic regions across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, plus new traffic security products for hosting and cloud providers.
Why investors are backing the agentic web
Backers frame the round around one shift: more web traffic now comes from software, not people. Imperva’s research puts bots at 53% of web traffic.
“Blackwall has built something rare: a security company that grows with the internet itself. ‘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, noted, “A tsunami of agents will overwhelm infrastructure optimised for human traffic. Nik and Denis are already delivering to their millions of customers the infrastructure optimised for the coming agentic web, and commercial success will flow to those businesses that are retooling today.”
“We’ve backed Blackwall from its early days and have seen the business scale into critical infrastructure for the web. As AI changes how traffic moves across the internet, Blackwall’s position at the front door of millions of websites has never been more important,” added Mina Samaan, General Partner at MMC Ventures.
“Nik and Denis combine real grit, deep technical knowledge and a rare grasp of where the opportunity lies and how to capture it. Blackwall, now protecting millions of websites, is exactly the kind of born-global company Tera exists to back. We were their first believers, backing them from day one through the early years of building the product and winning its first partners and customers. This round shows we’re far from the last,” concluded Stanislav Ivanov, Founding Partner, Tera Ventures.
Can a provider-first model beat the bigger platforms?
The pitch to hosting companies is practical. Filtering junk requests before they reach a server cuts infrastructure costs, and bundling security into hosting plans gives providers a new revenue line.
The competition is not standing still. Cloudflare is building paid controls for AI crawlers, and specialist rivals have raised smaller rounds: DataDome secured $42 million in 2023 and Netacea $12 million in 2022. The edge Blackwall is claiming is distribution, because the hosting provider owns the customer relationship.
The risk is accuracy. As agents multiply, Blackwall has to tell useful bots from harmful ones without blocking legitimate traffic or slowing sites. Expansion into 12 regions will test that, along with its partnerships.
The wider investment environment is also strengthening. According to cybersecurity funding data, European cybersecurity companies raised €1.3 billion across 64 rounds in the first half of 2026, a 124.8% increase compared with the same period in 2025.
