Blackwall raises its valuation to $2.2 billion to manage AI agent traffic

Blackwall's valuation, the Estonian company specializing in network traffic security, jumped fourfold to $2.2 billion after closing a Series C financing round of $100 million led by AVP with participation from its previous investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Terra Ventures. This leap in market value, compared with the company's last valuation in 2025, according to its executive chairperson Roy Carthy,A deep shift in internet infrastructure prioritiesWith the surge of AI agents and network congestion from complex software traffic that exceeds traditional denial-of-service and random crawling attack models.

Web infrastructure companies, such as Cloudflare (web security provider), Akamai (content delivery network specialist) and Imperva (cybersecurity firm), find themselves today on the front line against botnet farms, malicious requests and swarms of uncontrolled software agents. However, Blackwall chose a different path from competing with the majors in this space; it refused to sell its platform directly to site owners and instead adopted a distribution-channel model through partnerships with hosting service providers, managed service providers, and cloud providers. This model delivers a fully customizable, integrated security toolset to hosting companies, enabling them to offer protection tools to their customers under their own branding while retaining ownership of the commercial relationship with the end user.

This model provides shared financial benefits for both parties, as Nikita Rosenberg, the company's co-founder and CEO, explained that hosting companies are now able to mix and coordinate security components to build their own solutions, set pricing, and share revenue with the developer. The service starts with a free tier that reveals to the client the volume of visits and threats hitting their network, then charges for processing and protection tools. Technically, the system does not stop at traffic distribution, certificate management and mitigation of denial-of-service attacks, butIt uses digital fingerprints and proven AI models at the endpointsto analyze the behavior and intent of each incoming request, precisely distinguishing between legitimate software agents, malicious software, and intruders, by identifying the originating applications such as Microsoft Office or Codex.

The real bet goes beyond blocking attacks to shaping the emerging economy of software agents. Rosenberg believes that in the coming years AI agents will take on interaction tasks and conduct direct financial transactions with sites on behalf of human users, requiring new systems to manage these agents' access privileges, define their access conditions, and coordinate their payment authorizations. While Cloudflare offers centralized solutions such as an AI crawl control tool that lets site owners block crawlers or charge for access, Blackwall bets that hosting providers prefer to deliver these regulatory services themselves rather than hand over their customers' keys to an external security provider.

These developments are directly linked to the Middle East operating environment, especially as the company announced plans to expand its operations in the region alongside North America, Europe, Asia and the Pacific.This shift reshapes the calculations of regional data centers and cloud service providersIn the Gulf and Egypt, local platforms face growing streams of agent automation and software scanning without most enterprises having profit margins that allow offsetting bandwidth consumption costs. The availability of a channel-based security model gives regional telecom and hosting companies a way to protect their infrastructure and share the proceeds from clearing agent traffic under their own commercial umbrella, instead of exporting protection revenues to global intermediary platforms that capture customer bills.

This round confirms that the competitive arena in the AI economy is gradually shifting from model training to guarding entry points and digital exchange. As agents begin to act as independent buyers and browsers, the decisive edge among hosting platforms will be the ability to instantly distinguish between an authorized agent carrying a commercial transaction and a malicious bot consuming resources, making software traffic-management tools a cornerstone of site stability and operational profitability in the upcoming phase.