Estonian cybersecurity firm Blackwall has secured €45 million in Series B funding to further develop its solutions protecting small and medium-sized businesses from malicious online traffic, writes TechCrunch.
The investment round was led by B2B-focused venture capital firm Dawn Capital, with participation from MMC Ventures, which previously led the company’s €12M Series A round just one year ago. The new funding is one of the larger Series B rounds for an Estonian cybersecurity company, as the country is growing more and more prominent in the space.
Founded in 2019 and formerly known as BotGuard, Blackwall has developed a flagship product called GateKeeper, a reverse proxy that inspects and analyses traffic in real time, filtering out malicious requests including bots and intruders. Denis Prochko, co-founder of Blackwall, renamed the company after a digital barrier in the video game Cyberpunk 2077 that prevents dangerous artificial intelligences from infiltrating a network.
The company has recently expanded its product line up to include ad fraud prevention for e-commerce websites, protecting businesses from having their advertising budgets consumed by bot traffic.
“The main difference is that large enterprises typically can survive these attacks. Most of these threats can simply kill small businesses,” explains Nikita Rozenberg, Blackwall’s founder and CEO, highlighting why the company focuses specifically on the SMB market.
The startup has achieved significant scale through its “channel model” approach, partnering with hosting service providers, managed service providers, and e-commerce platforms rather than selling directly to SMBs. Blackwall now serving more than 2.3 million websites and applications through partnerships with over 100 service providers.
The fresh capital will enable Blackwall to double its current 65-person team and accelerate expansion into the U.S. and APAC markets.
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