A huge chunk of online traffic now comes from bots, both good and bad — but AI is boosting the latter. From DDoS attacks to scraping, there’s a renewed barrage of threats that companies have to deal with.
According to cybersecurity entrepreneur Nikita Rozenberg, the impact is more severe for SMBs. “The main difference is that large enterprises typically can survive with that. Most of these threats can simply kill small businesses.”
This inspired him to start Blackwall, an Estonia-based startup formerly known as BotGuard that shares similarities with CloudFlare, Imperva and others, but with a focus on SMBs.
This focus also influenced its product roadmap: It recently launched an ad fraud prevention product that prevents e-commerce websites from having their ad spend consumed by bots.
The pace at which the startup has been launching new applications and plans to keep on doing so is one factor that resonated with Dawn Capital, the B2B-focused VC firm that is backing Blackwall’s €45 million Series B round (approximately $49.2 million).
The funding will help further develop new products beyond its flagship product, GateKeeper, a reverse proxy that inspects traffic, analyzes it — also using AI — and filters malicious requests in real time. These threats include bots, but also intruders, for instance.
That’s also why Blackwall rebranded to reflect its expanded scope. Rozenberg’s co-founder Denis Prochko came up with the new name, a nod to video game Cyberpunk 2077, in which a complex firewall called the Blackwall protects the Net from rogue AIs.
Video game lore aside, the reality of Blackwall is lower profile; to adapt to SMBs, it needs its offering to be both easy to use and automated, which means it is often invisible to end users. That’s also because Blackwall doesn’t sell to SMBs directly, and instead opted for what Rozenberg calls a “channel model.”
This strategy consists in partnering with intermediaries like hosting service providers, managed service providers and e-commerce platforms that are looking to improve their margins. Offering Blackwall to their customers can be a differentiation factor and also a way to lower costs incurred from malicious traffic.
That’s also why Blackwall is going for midmarket players that can’t spend millions on in-house product development like their largest competitors such as GoDaddy, and need external support to handle this issue. Conversely, the startup found this sales strategy particularly fruitful.
Partnering with more than 100 of these players helped Blackwall scale quickly since its launch in 2019: With a team of 65, it claims that its services are now deployed across more than 2.3 million websites and applications.
The new funding will now help it double its headcount, and double down on its expansion into the U.S. and APAC markets. It will count on Dawn Capital’s support to do so, as well as from VC firm MMC Ventures, which participated in this round after leading the startup’s €12 million Series A just one year ago (approximately $13.1 million at today’s exchange rate.)