A huge piece of online traffic now comes from bots, both good and bad – but AI stimulates the latter. From DDOS attacks to scraping, there is a renewed barrage of threats that companies have to deal with.
According to CyberSecurity entrepreneur Nikita Rozenberg, the impact is more serious for SMEs. “The most important difference is that large companies can usually survive with that. Most of these threats can simply kill small companies. “
This inspired him to start BlackwallA startup based in Estonia that is previously known as Botguard who shares similarities with Cloudflare, Imperva and others, but with a focus on SMEs.
This focus also had an influence on its product trout map: it recently launched a product fraud prevention product that prevents e-commerce websites from having their advertisements consume by Bots.
The pace at which the startup has launched new applications and planning to continue to do so is a factor that resonated with Dawn Capital, the B2B-oriented VC company that supports Blackwall’s Series B-round of € 45 million (around $ 49.2 million).
The financing will help to further develop new products outside the flagship product, gatekeeper, a reverse proxy This inspects traffic, analyzes it – also with the help of AI – and filters malignant requests in real -time requests. These threats include bots, but also intruders, for example.
That is also the reason why Blackwall reflected a new reach to display his extensive scope. The co-founder of Rozenberg 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 against Rogue Ais.
VideoGame aside, the reality of Blackwall is a lower profile; To adapt to SMEs, it must need its offer to be both easy to use and to be automated, which means that it is often invisible to end users. That is also because Blackwall does not directly sell SMEs and instead opted for what Rozenberg calls a ‘channel model’.
This strategy consists of collaboration with intermediaries such as hosting service providers, managed service providers and e-commerce platforms that want to improve their margins. Offering Blackwall to their customers can be a differentiative factor and also a way to lower the costs incurred by malignant traffic.
That is also the reason why Blackwall goes for midmarket players who cannot spend millions on internal product development such as their biggest competitors such as Godaddy, and need external support to tackle this problem. Conversely, the startup found this sales strategy particularly fruitful.
By working together with more than 100 of these players, Blackwall helped to scale quickly since the launch in 2019: with a team of 65 it claims that his services are now being used at more than 2.3 million websites and applications.
The new financing will now help to double his workforce and to double his extension to the American and APAC markets. It will count on the support of Dawn Capital to do this, as well as from VC company MMC Ventures, who participated in this round after leading the startup € 12 million Series A Only a year ago (about $ 13.1 million against today’s exchange rate.)