We’ve all tried to sign into a web page to book a flight or read an interesting article, and got hit by the same page: click here to say “I’m not a robot”.

For the last few decades, this question has made sense. While some “robots” were helpful, for example the ones that indexed your site to make sure you show up in Google search results, many were not, and in fact letting them in left your business exposed to account takeovers, payment fraud and unsolicited scraping.

But sometime this year, these robots overtook humans on the web. More than half of all requests now come from machines, not people. And the fastest-growing share is AI agents acting on behalf of people.

As such, the question is no longer whether or not you’re a robot, but rather, whether you are an authorised agent. The internet has moved into a world in which agents will be the customer. Agents will be negotiating refunds for items, comparing different suppliers, checking stock at midnight, and the right decision will be to let them into our websites and applications.

On the flip side, malicious agents will become more capable than ever, so keeping them out will be key. And it isn’t just agents impersonating humans; it’s agents impersonating other agents.

It is against this backdrop that Blackwall has raised a $100m round at a $2.2bn valuation to become the infrastructure of the agentic web.

Nik and Denis, Blackwall’s founders, had the insight to create intelligent bot mitigation for the future web. With frontier models accelerating agentic capabilities, they knew that the most important question would become which agents should I let in, rather than how do I keep them all out. They knew that traditional rules-based approaches that are backward-looking would not be fit for purpose, and would need to be replaced by real-time permissioning and organisation-wide context. And finally, they knew that businesses might not want to buy security directly, but rather through the hosting providers that run their infrastructure.

Today, Blackwall manages traffic for millions of websites globally, working with hosting and service providers across the US, Europe, India, APAC and Latin America. Blackwall's modular platform lets a provider give each business protection by default, then switch on bot management, WAF, DDoS mitigation, caching, and agent-level access controls.

We are excited to welcome our friends at AVP to the Blackwall journey.

Most of all, congratulations to Nik, Denis, and the entire Blackwall team. The agentic web is here, and Blackwall is the layer it will run through.