An enormous chunk of online traffic now comes from bots, each good and bad — but AI is boosting the latter. From DDoS attacks to scraping, there’s a renewed barrage of threats that firms need to cope with.
In accordance with cybersecurity entrepreneur Nikita Rozenberg, the impact is more severe for SMBs. “The principal difference is that enormous enterprises typically can survive with that. Most of those threats can simply kill small businesses.”
This inspired him to start out Blackwall, an Estonia-based startup formerly referred to as BotGuard that shares similarities with CloudFlare, Imperva and others, but with a concentrate on SMBs.
This focus also influenced its product roadmap: It recently launched an ad fraud prevention product that stops e-commerce web sites from having their ad spend consumed by bots.
The pace at which the startup has been launching recent applications and plans to maintain on doing so is one factor that resonated with Dawn Capital, the B2B-focused VC firm that’s backing Blackwall’s €45 million Series B round (roughly $49.2 million).
The funding will help further develop recent 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 in addition intruders, as an example.
That’s also why Blackwall rebranded to reflect its expanded scope. Rozenberg’s co-founder Denis Prochko got here up with the brand new name, a nod to video game Cyberpunk 2077, during which a posh firewall called the Blackwall protects the Net from rogue AIs.
Video game lore aside, the fact of Blackwall is lower profile; to adapt to SMBs, it needs its offering to be each easy to make use of and automatic, which suggests it is commonly invisible to finish users. That’s also because Blackwall doesn’t sell to SMBs directly, and as a substitute 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 which are seeking to improve their margins. Offering Blackwall to their customers could be a differentiation factor and in addition a technique to lower costs incurred from malicious traffic.
That’s also why Blackwall goes for midmarket players that may’t spend tens of millions on in-house product development like their largest competitors equivalent to GoDaddy, and wish external support to handle this issue. Conversely, the startup found this sales strategy particularly fruitful.
Partnering with greater than 100 of those players helped Blackwall scale quickly since its launch in 2019: With a team of 65, it claims that its services are actually deployed across greater than 2.3 million web sites and applications.
The brand new funding will now help it double its headcount, and double down on its expansion into the U.S. and APAC markets. It should count on Dawn Capital’s support to accomplish that, in addition to from VC firm MMC Ventures, which participated on this round after leading the startup’s €12 million Series A only one yr ago (roughly $13.1 million at today’s exchange rate.)
