Estonia’s Blackwall Raises €45 Million to Enhance SMB Cybersecurity

The Estonian startup Blackwall raised €45 million euros—around $49.2 million—in its latest funding round, to continue developing products to protect small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) from malicious online threats.

According to TechCrunch, the recent investment comes from a Series B round and will be destined to develop Blackwall’s technology including Gatekeeper, its flagship product—an AI-powered reverse proxy that analyzes websites’s traffic and identifies and blocks malicious requests.

Blackwall, previously known as Botguard, was founded in 2019 as a solution for the increasing cyberattacks affecting all companies and e-commerce across the globe.

“The main difference is that large enterprises typically can survive with that,” explained Blackwall’s CEO and co-founder Nikita Rozenberg. “Most of these threats can simply kill small businesses.”

The startup has been launching multiple products and services, including recently an ad fraud prevention initiative to help e-commerce websites safely invest in advertisements without getting their ads consumed by bots.

The company changed its name to Blackwell—inspired by the video game Cyberpunk 2077—as its owners began to expand its services beyond attacks related to bots.

They have also partnered with hosting services providers—who also need external alliances to meet client’s needs—so that potential customers can include the cybersecurity products in their offering.

Blackwall’s growth and business strategy have gotten the interest of Dawn Capital, one of the main investors in the company.

The startup has now partnered with more than 100 companies, and its services are being used by more than 2.3 million websites and apps. With the new investment, Blackwell expects to continue its expansion to the Unites States and APAC markets and keep developing its technologies.

One of its competitors, CloudFlare, has also been developing AI-powered tools to help customers avoid AI bots.