- Spur Intelligence raised $200 million from Insight Partners for IP intelligence.
- The round is the company’s first major institutional raise since 2017.
- Spur found 94% of firms met anonymising VPNs or proxies in incidents.
Behavioural analytics has been the default fraud-detection tool for a decade. Generative AI is quietly breaking it, since it can now mimic normal user behaviour convincingly enough to slip past it. Spur Intelligence, a Lake Mary, Florida-based IP intelligence company, just raised $200 million from Insight Partners to sell a different signal entirely: not what traffic does, but where it actually comes from.
The round is Spur’s first major institutional investment since its founding in 2017, according to public filings.
Kevin Hickey, the company’s CEO, said the raise reflects rising urgency around the problem: “Demand for high-fidelity IP intelligence is accelerating as organisations struggle to understand the true source and intent behind internet traffic. With Insight’s experience helping software companies scale, we’re positioned to expand faster while continuing to deliver the accuracy and context our customers rely on.”
Spur’s own 2026 IP Intelligence Study found that 94% of organisations encountered anonymising VPNs or residential proxies during a security incident in the past year, and nearly half plan to buy or upgrade a commercial IP intelligence tool within 12 months.
The company argues that as attackers use AI to fake legitimate-looking behaviour, the origin of a connection, whether it’s routed through a residential proxy network, a VPN, or a bot farm, becomes harder to fake and therefore more valuable as a signal.
Built by two ex-Pentagon engineers, sold to enterprise security teams
Spur was founded by Riley Kilmer and Ethan Smith, both of whom previously worked as software engineers for the U.S. Department of Defence before starting the company. It has grown to roughly 40 employees without previously raising a disclosed institutional round, building its intelligence instead through continuous observation of anonymising infrastructure.
The startup, founded in 2017, works by identifying when a network connection is being deliberately obscured and converting that signal into context security and fraud teams can act on in real time, delivered through APIs, data feeds and session enrichment.
For example, a bank’s fraud team could flag a login that looks behaviorally normal but is routed through a residential proxy network tied to known credential-stuffing campaigns, a pattern that purely behaviour-based tools would miss.
The company competes with far larger threat intelligence players, including Palo Alto Networks and Recorded Future, as well as more direct rivals in IP and network-origin data such as GreyNoise and MaxMind. Where Spur says it differentiates is treating network-origin attribution, not behaviour modelling, as its core signal, arguing this is the kind of real-world infrastructure data that AI models cannot fabricate.
Scaling to meet enterprise demand
The raise lands amid heavy investor appetite for cybersecurity companies confronting AI-driven attacks. Chainguard closed a $356 million Series D at a $3.5 billion valuation, Island secured $250 million at a $5.3 billion valuation, and Abnormal AI raised $250 million at a $5.1 billion valuation, as enterprises prioritise identity security, cloud protection and AI-powered threat detection.
Tech Funding News has also tracked smaller raises chasing the same problem: DataDome and HUMAN Security for bot-driven fraud, and Resistant AI and Memcyco for AI-powered financial crime.
Investors are increasingly favouring startups that pair proprietary threat data with machine learning rather than relying solely on foundation models, and Spur’s decade of accumulated network observation fits that pattern. The global cybersecurity market was valued at $245.6 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $500.7 billion by 2030, driven by cloud adoption and AI-powered threats.
Insight Partners, a global software investment firm, led the round. Thomas Krane, managing director at Insight Partners, says: “We’re in the middle of a massive shift in fraud prevention. Spur has built one of the most comprehensive intelligence layers for understanding the true origin of internet traffic, giving security and fraud teams the visibility they need to make faster, more confident decisions.”
The capital will go toward product development, broadening intelligence coverage, expanding integrations and growing customer operations, the company said.
As AI keeps closing the gap between real and fabricated user behaviour, the open question is whether infrastructure-origin data stays a step ahead, or whether attackers eventually find ways to make their traffic look like it’s coming from nowhere identifiable at all.
