Blackwall Secures €45 Million Series B Funding for AI-Powered Cybersecurity Solution Targeting SMBs

Estonia-based Blackwall raises €45 million Series B to protect SMBs from malicious online traffic | TechCrunch

A huge chunk of online traffic now comes from bots, both good and bad -- but AI is boosting the latter. From DDoS attacks to scraping, there's a renewed barrage of threats that companies have to deal with. According to cybersecurity entrepreneur Nikita Rozenberg, the impact is more severe for SMBs. "The main difference is that large enterprises typically can survive with that. Most of these threats can simply kill small businesses." This inspired him to start Blackwall, an Estonia-based startup formerly known as BotGuard that shares similarities with CloudFlare, Imperva and others, but with a focus on SMBs. This focus also influenced its product roadmap: It recently launched an ad fraud prevention product that prevents e-commerce websites from having their ad spend consumed by bots. The pace at which the startup has been launching new applications and plans to keep on doing so is one factor that resonated with Dawn Capital, the B2B-focused VC firm that is backing Blackwall's €45 million Series B round (approximately $49.2 million). The funding will help further develop new products beyond its flagship product, GateKeeper, a reverse proxy that inspects traffic, analyzes it -- also using AI -- and filters malicious requests in real time. These threats include bots, but also intruders, for instance. That's also why Blackwall rebranded to reflect its expanded scope. Rozenberg's co-founder 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 from rogue AIs. Video game lore aside, the reality of Blackwall is lower profile; to adapt to SMBs, it needs its offering to be both easy to use and automated, which means it is often invisible to end users. That's also because Blackwall doesn't sell to SMBs directly, and instead opted for what Rozenberg calls a "channel model." This strategy consists in partnering with intermediaries like hosting service providers, managed service providers and e-commerce platforms that are looking to improve their margins. Offering Blackwall to their customers can be a differentiation factor and also a way to lower costs incurred from malicious traffic. That's also why Blackwall is going for midmarket players that can't spend millions on in-house product development like their largest competitors such as GoDaddy, and need external support to handle this issue. Conversely, the startup found this sales strategy particularly fruitful. Partnering with more than 100 of these players helped Blackwall scale quickly since its launch in 2019: With a team of 65, it claims that its services are now deployed across more than 2.3 million websites and applications. The new funding will now help it double its headcount, and double down on its expansion into the U.S. and APAC markets. It will count on Dawn Capital's support to do so, as well as from VC firm MMC Ventures, which participated in this round after leading the startup's €12 million Series A just one year ago (approximately $13.1 million at today's exchange rate.)

Blackwall reels in €45M for its AI-powered reverse proxy - SiliconANGLE

Blackwall, a startup that helps website hosting providers protect customers from cyberattacks, has secured €45 million in funding. The Estonia-based software maker announced the Series B investment today. Dawn Capital led the round with participation from MMC Ventures, which led Blackwall's previous €12 million raise last March. Blackwall sells a reverse proxy called GateKeeper that protects more than 2.3 million online services. When users visit a GateKeeper-powered website, their network requests aren't sent directly to the website but rather go through the reverse proxy first. This helps companies block malicious traffic before it reaches their servers. GateKeeper also makes it more difficult to carry out cybersecurity reconnaissance. This is the process through which hackers search for vulnerabilities in a website before launching a cyberattack. According to Blackwall, GateKeeper helps filter the network requests that hackers use to collect technical data about websites. GateKeeper ships with a set of preconfigured rules for blocking malicious traffic. An artificial intelligence tool, the AI Advisor, helps administrators determine which rules they should enable for a given website. Companies with more advanced requirements can create custom traffic filtering policies. One of the methods GateKeeper uses to spot malicious requests is deep packet inspection. Some cybersecurity tools only analyze each packet's header, which contains details such as the IP address from which the traffic was sent and its destination. Deep packet inspection algorithm also study the data inside a packet to determine if it may be malicious. Blackwall says its software can mitigate a wide range of cyberattacks. It blocks distributed denial-of-service attacks, SQL injections and attempts to install malicious code on a website operator's servers. GateKeeper can also detect bots that attempt to scrape content without permission. Alongside its core features for filtering malicious traffic, GateKeeper provides a number of other capabilities. It can automatically renew a website's SSL certificate to save time for administrators. A built-in load balancer evenly splits network traffic among the servers that host a website, which avoids situations where one server receives significantly more requests than the others and becomes overloaded. Blackwall doesn't distribute GateKeeper directly to its users, but rather sells the platform to hosting and managed service providers. It promises to help those companies reduce their operating expenses by up to 25%. Additionally, infrastructure providers can use GateKeeper to power paid cybersecurity add-ons for their hosting plans.