Estonia's Blackwall is now worth 2.2 billion dollars, four times more than last year: bots have flooded the internet, and someone has to chase them out

Estonian company Blackwall has raised 100 million dollars (about 86 million euros) in a Series C round, at a valuation of 2.2 billion dollars (about 1.9 billion euros). The round was led by the AVP fund, with existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures also putting in money. According to executive chairman Roy Karthy, the company's valuation is four times higher than at its previous raise in 2025.

The business is easy to explain and increasingly hard to do: separating the real visitor from the bot. Today's internet is filled with DDoS attacks, mass automated scraping, bot farms and, more and more often, AI agents running out of control. Giants like Cloudflare, Akamai and Imperva are already crowding that space.

Blackwall doesn't go up against them directly. Instead of selling to websites, it sells to hosting providers, managed IT service firms and cloud companies, which then offer the tools to their own customers under their own name. The provider picks the components, sets the price and shares part of the revenue with Blackwall. The basic package is free and only shows what kind of traffic and threats are hitting the network - protection costs money. A classic model: first they show you how vulnerable you are, then they sell you the lock.

The technique behind it, according to co-founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg, is digital fingerprinting: the company recognises which software is sending the request - for example Microsoft Office or Codex - and filters out the bots that way. Its own AI models also run at customers' sites, analysing the intent and behaviour of each request to tell an agent sent by a person with a genuine purpose from a malicious bot.

Rozenberg sees the real opportunity further ahead: when AI agents start buying and making deals on websites on behalf of their users, someone will have to decide which agent gets access, on what terms, and whether it's allowed to pay. Cloudflare is already waiting there, with its AI Crawl Control, which lets site owners allow or block individual AI crawlers that harvest content, and even charge them for access. Rozenberg argues his advantage is that the customer stays with their hosting company, instead of handing themselves over to yet another security giant.

The money will go towards expansion in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. A company from a small Baltic country has reached a valuation of more than two billion dollars by selling the hosting industry a product that the industry then sells on as its own. Could a startup from the Balkans build a business that inconspicuous - and that valuable?