A huge part of online traffic now comes from bots, both good and bad – but the AI reinforces the latter. From DDOS attacks to scraping, there is a renewed threat barrier that companies must face.
According to the businessman in cyberspace Nikita Rozenberg, the impact is more serious for the media. “The main difference is that large businesses can usually survive with it. Most of these threats can simply kill small businesses.”
That inspired him to start BlackAn Estonia -based start, formerly known as Botguard that shares similarities to Cloudflare, Imperva and others, but with an emphasis on the media.
This focus also influenced the product route map: recently launched a product of advertising fraud that prevents e -commerce sites from consuming their ads from bots.
The pace at which the start has begun new applications and plans to continue to be a factor resonating with Dawn Capital, the B2B VC company, which supports the 45m B2B Blackwall round (about $ 49.2 million).
Funding will help further develop new products beyond the flagship product, gatekeeper, a reverse This inspects traffic, analyzes it – also using AI – and filters malicious requests in real time. These threats include bots, but also invaders, for example.
That is why Blackwall was rebuilt to reflect its wide range of scope. Rozenberg co -founder Denis Prochko came with the new name, a nod to the Cyberpunk 2077 video game, in which a complex protection wall called Blackwall protects the net from Rogue Ais.
The video game fails, the reality of Blackwall is a lower profile. To adapt to the media, it needs its offer to be easy to use and automated, which means that it is often invisible to end users. This is also due to the fact that Blackwall does not sell directly to MMB and opted for what Rozenberg calls a “channel model”.
This strategy consists of collaborating with intermediaries such as hosting service providers, service providers and e -commerce platforms trying to improve their margins. The blackwall offer to their customers can be a differentiation factor and also a way to reduce the cost of malicious traffic.
This is why Blackwall goes for mid -range players who cannot spend millions on home development, such as their biggest competitors such as Godaddy and need external support to handle this issue. On the contrary, the start found this sales strategy very fruitful.
Working with more than 100 of these players helped the Blackwall scale quickly since its release in 2019: with Group 65, it claims that its services are now growing at more than 2.3 million sites and applications.
The new funding will now help double its staff and double its expansion to US and APAC markets. It will count on Dawn Capital’s support to do so, as well as by VC MMC Ventures, which participated in this round after the start of the start Series of 12 million euros a Just a year ago (about $ 13.1 million in today’s exchange rate.)
