€100 million investment turns Estonian startup Blackwall into a unicorn
Cyberattack prevention startup Blackwall has raised €100 million from investors in a funding round that values the company at an estimated $2.2 billion.
Blackwall specializes in filtering bot traffic, distinguishing malicious automated programs from other web traffic. Estonia-linked venture capital firm Tera Ventures made its first investment of approximately $300,000 in Blackwall six years ago.
"We have been monitoring their development, looking at how they were progressing, how their first pilot customers were responding to the service, how the product was developing and what feedback they were getting from the market. Based on that, I think we participated in another two funding rounds before they started raising capital in London," said Stanislav Ivanov, founding partner of Tera Ventures.
The latest investment has pushed the company's valuation above $2 billion.
"There are several investors, but the lead investor is ABP, a global growth fund. Their funds have a combined value of $2 billion to $3 billion. This round has established a valuation of $2.2 billion, but if the company continues to grow, we will see higher figures in the future," Ivanov said.
For Tera Ventures, this represents a significant increase in the value of its fund.
"For us, this naturally means a potentially very strong return for the fund. At some point, the company may go public or another exit event may take place in the future. But above all, we want to emphasize that this is proof that our strategy works," Ivanov said.
Blackwall is the second company to achieve unicorn status in the past two weeks.
"Skeleton and Blackwall. Estonia now has 12 unicorns in total and I think that's more per capita than any other country in the world," said Doris Põld, CEO of the Estonian Association of Information Technology and Telecommunications (ITL).
Põld believes more unicorns will emerge in the near future.
"I think we will see more good news like this over the next year, especially since the latest success stories have come not so much from traditional software development but rather from deep-tech companies and the cybersecurity sector, particularly in collaboration with other industries. I believe the next strengths of our technology sector will emerge from cooperation with other industries and from deep tech — why not, for example, from combining technology and defense?" Põld said.
ERR was unable to obtain a comment from Blackwall executives on Wednesday.
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Editor: Marcus Turovski, Johanna Alvin
