A large part of online traffic now comes from bots, both good and bad, but the AI is promoting the latter. From ddos attacks to scraped, there is a renewed barrage of threats with which companies have to deal with.
According to cybersecurity businesswoman Nikita Rozenberg, the impact is more severe for SMEs. “The main difference is that large companies can generally survive with that. Most of these threats can simply kill small businesses. “
This inspired him to start Black wallA Startup based in Estonia previously known as Botguard that shares similarities with Cloudflare, Impendo and others, but with an focus on SMEs.
This approach also influenced the road map of its product: recently launched a advertising fraud prevention product that prevents electronic commerce websites from having their advertising spending consumed by Bots.
The rhythm at which the startup has been launching new applications and plans to continue doing so is a factor that resonated with Dawn Capital, the company VC centered on B2B that supports the round of 45 million B series B of Blackwall (approximately $ 49.2 million).
Financing will further help develop new products beyond its flagship, gatekeeper, a Inverse proxy That inspects traffic, analyzes, also using AI, and filters malicious requests in real time. These threats include bots, but also intruders, for example.
That is also the reason why Blackwall renamed to reflect its extended scope. The co -founder of Rozenberg, Denis Prochko, came up with the new name, a wink to the Cyberpunk 2077 video game, in which a Firewall complex called Blackwall protects the Rogue Ais network.
Leaving aside the tradition of video games, Blackwall’s reality is a lower profile; To adapt to SMEs, you need your offer to be easy to use and automated, which means that it is often invisible to end users. This is also because Blackwall is not sold directly to SMEs, and instead opted for what Rozenberg calls a “channel model.”
This strategy consists of associating with intermediaries such as the accommodation of service providers, administrated service providers and electronic commerce platforms that seek to improve their margins. Offering Blackwall to its customers can be a differentiation factor and also a way to reduce the costs incurred in malicious traffic.
That is also the reason why Blackwall is looking for Midmarket players who cannot spend millions in the development of internal products, such as their biggest competitors, such as Godaddy, and need external support to handle this problem. On the contrary, the startup found this particularly fruitful sales strategy.
The association with more than 100 of these players helped Blackwall rapidly climb from its launch in 2019: with a 65 team, it states that their services are now implemented in more than 2.3 million websites and applications.
The new financing will now help him duplicate his staff and double his expansion to the US markets and APAC. It will feature the support of Dawn Capital to do so, as well as the Risk capital firm MMC Ventures, which participated in this round after leading the startup’s € 12 million series to Only one year ago (approximately $ 13.1 million at the current exchange rate).