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

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.

The company will use its newly raised funding to double its headcount. The new hires are aimed at helping it grow its international presence and accelerate product development initiatives. 

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