Estonia's Newest Unicorn Hits $2.2B Weeks After Joining the Club

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Some startups wait years to become unicorns. Estonia's Blackwall joined the club and barely paused for breath. Weeks after it was reported at a €1 billion valuation in September, the web traffic management company has raised a $100 million Series C at a $2.2 billion valuation. AVP led the round, with existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures taking part. Blackwall also ranked fifth in TopTech 2026, Estonia's annual list of its 30 most valuable tech companies.

A bouncer for the web

Blackwall works inside the infrastructure of web hosting providers. It covers bot mitigation, DDoS protection, a web application firewall, load balancing, server-side encryption and the management of agentic AI traffic. In short, it decides which visitors are real people or legitimate bots and which are attackers and abusers. The company filters billions of requests per day, and AVP describes it as the layer in front of millions of websites.

“The web is becoming more automated, more distributed and more complex,” said co-founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg. His investors clearly agree. Norman Fiore of Dawn Capital warned that “a tsunami of agents will overwhelm infrastructure optimised for human traffic,” while AVP's Warda Shaheen called Blackwall a security company that grows with the internet itself.

Where the money goes

The company will use the funding to expand across 12 strategic regions in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, to deepen its platform and to build a traffic management ecosystem around its network of hosting providers, in a hosting market estimated at $200 billion. “Our ambition is to build the traffic management ecosystem that brings those worlds together,” Rozenberg said. If AI agents keep multiplying at the current pace, the bouncer business looks set to stay busy.