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California School Data Breach May Affect Up to 17 Million StudentsPaper from Wang Youqing's team accepted by ACM MM 2026Chrome to Warn Users Before Opening 'Suspicious' SitesGrafana Labs unveils AI agents to automate AI observabilityMeta Pauses Muse Conversation Sharing After Researchers Find 6,800 Public LinksPolestar and Oxford researchers seek to measure a performance car's effect on the driver
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Blackwall Raises $100M Series C at $2.2B Valuation to Scale Web Traffic Management Platform

Blackwall raised $100M Series C at $2.2B valuation to scale its web traffic management platform, led by AVP.

AI News Feed · 2026-10-21 02:51

The company’s flagship product, GateKeeper, inspects incoming traffic by filtering malicious bots, application-layer distributed denial-of-service attacks, and brute-force login attempts before they reach client applications. Blackwall’s broader service includes firewalls, load balancing, and optimization tools that distinguish legitimate and artificial intelligence traffic from potential attackers.

“The web is becoming more automated, more distributed and more complex, but the infrastructure that powers it remains highly fragmented,” said Chief Executive and co-founder Nikita Rozenberg, according to SiliconANGLE. “Our ambition is to build the traffic management ecosystem that brings those worlds together.”

The company changed its name from BotGuard in March 2025 alongside its Series B funding round. The name Blackwall references Cyberpunk 2077, a science fiction video game published by CD Projekt Red, in which the Blackwall is a digital barrier protecting the Net from rogue artificial intelligences.

Rozenberg said the new funding would let the company expand globally and deepen its platform, giving hosting and infrastructure providers the technology to participate in the next generation of the web.

AVP led the funding round, with participation from existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures, and Tera Ventures. “Blackwall has built something rare: a security company that grows with the internet itself,” said AVP General Partner Warda Shaheen, according to SiliconANGLE. “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.”

Blackwall partners with web hosting and cloud providers to catch unwanted traffic, cut operating costs, and speed up traffic. Its modular nature also boosts customer-facing web security features, which customers can pick and choose, package, and bundle as their own products, generating revenue without building or maintaining the technology themselves.

The web hosting market hit $150 billion in 2025, according to a report from Grand View Research Inc., and is projected to reach $178 billion by the end of this year. The same report estimates that the market will reach $506 billion by 2033. Blackwall supports this market by providing cybersecurity resilience for providers that add its services to their own offerings. According to Grand View, the market is driven primarily by growth in startups and small-business activity online.