Blackwall, a web security company, has raised $100 million in a round led by AVP that values it at $2.2 billion, four times its previous valuation.
By that math, the company was worth roughly $550 million before the deal. Warda Shaheen, a general partner at AVP, made the investor's case: Blackwall "is already the layer in front of millions of websites," and as more of the web's traffic comes from agents (software that browses and acts on a user's behalf), the company in that position "becomes indispensable." Blackwall did not disclose revenue or customer counts in the announcement. We have asked the company for comment and will update this piece if it responds.
The thesis is easy to follow. A company that sits between visitors and websites sees more demand as automated traffic grows, because someone has to sort the humans from the bots, and the agents from the scrapers.
But the evidence offered so far is thin. The strongest statement comes from the investor who set the price and has a stake in it. "Millions of websites" measures reach, not income, since a free-tier site counts the same as a large paying customer. The market is also crowded: Cloudflare and Akamai already sell bot management to many of the same sites.
Agents also complicate the pitch. Some are traffic a site wants, such as a shopping assistant buying on a customer's behalf, so blocking everything is not the product. Telling the two apart is.
That leaves the real question behind a $2.2 billion price: whether agent traffic ends up paid for, blocked, or waved through. Only the first two give the gatekeeper something to sell.