By Norman Fiore, Shamillah Bankiya, Nils Howland
It all started with vegetarianism…
When Denis Prochko, Blackwall’s CTO, launched a vegetarian recipe site as a passion project, he had no idea it would lead to the founding of one of the most remarkable infrastructure companies on the market.
Denis’s recipe site very quickly proved extremely successful. But with that success came the bane of millions of small and medium-sized businesses — bots. Many of the bots targeting the site were harmless, but others attempted to steal IP, drive ad fraud, or hack the site. Together, this bot traffic overwhelmed the ‘good’ traffic the business relied upon.
Frustrated by the lack of available solutions tailored for SMBs, Denis and his longtime friend, Blackwall’s co-founder and CEO, Nik Rozenberg, put their collective decades of experience developing apps to use and built a game-changing bot mitigation product which they then offered to third parties. The product quickly went viral, attracting hundreds of customers within weeks and sparking thousands of discussions on Reddit. The rest, as they say, were points on a J curve — Blackwall has grown from 0 to over 2 million end customers in the last two years…
The channel is king
Blackwall is unique in that its founders were as innovative in their go-to-market approach as they were in building their product. Typically, a software developer sees the indirect sales channel as a necessary evil — something that provides scalability, but which can be squeezed over time as the power shifts with the developer’s success. Blackwall has completely flipped that model on its head. In order to reach millions of SMBs, the company is building products for channel partners — Hosting Service Providers (HSPs) and Managed Services Providers (MSPs) — to sell through to SMBs. So, rather than being seen as a necessary evil, Blackwall’s success is inextricably linked to the success of its channel partners. The products Blackwall is building directly help channel partners with their operations.
Revenue, cost, why not both?
The efficiency Blackwall brings partners through its products is very timely.
Global spending on HSPs and MSPs is north of $500 billion annually. But these providers are also looking for new products to drive further revenues from existing customers, as historical ‘cash cows’ such as hosting and domains are no longer driving enough growth. In addition, AI is driving the volume and sophistication of attacks HSPs and MSPs have to manage, putting profitability under pressure. While big providers can afford to spend millions on in-house product development, many HSPs and MSPs need external support to provide competitive solutions to their end customers.
Today, Blackwall’s flagship offering is a network security product that proxies requests from the outer web to customers’ servers, hiding servers from bots, hacker attacks, and other kinds of unwanted visitors, while simultaneously optimizing traffic flow. Unwanted bot traffic throttles networks, increasing costs for HSPs and MSPs while slowing down their customers’ sites. Partners therefore obtain a double benefit with Blackwall — they lower costs by 10–25%, and earn new revenue from upselling the network security product to their end customers.
A product that delights
HSPs and MSPs also love Blackwall because its product is so easy to use.
MSPs tend to serve hundreds of SMBs, while HSPs often serve hundreds of thousands of SMBs. In both cases, having a scalable, low maintenance solution is key — and Blackwall offers that solution. It has been described by customers as a “set and forget” product requiring extremely low maintenance. With just one line of code, customers can see the impact on their traffic in real time. And, with just a click, SMBs can turn on Blackwall’s security and infrastructure products.
Additionally, at a time when customers are looking for a best-of-breed solution, Blackwall’s AI-powered product shines, driving 30% improvement in malicious activity detection, and reducing the cost of aftercare by 15–20%.
An expansive vision
When we asked Nik and Denis about their vision for Blackwall — what technical infrastructure products they envisioned building for their MSP/HSP and SME customers — they had an unusual response. They said: “everything”. While we are usually sceptical about such responses, in this case their bold vision hits the road with a very deliberate product strategy that matches operational fires at their customers to the ever growing capability of their platform — all underpinned by relentless execution.
In the past six months alone, they have rapidly launched several new applications. These include an ad fraud product that prevents e-commerce websites from having their ad spend consumed by bots, and an application load balancing product that allows HSPs to distribute traffic to prevent any single server from becoming a bottleneck.
The company has also expanded rapidly into new geographies. Blackwall HQ is in Estonia, and European channels have driven their initial phenomenal growth. Building on this success, last year, Nik and Denis took their successful European playbook and launched in the US. They have also launched in APAC, hiring a team that is already breaking into some of the region’s largest customers.
And this is just the beginning. The founders plan to launch three-to-four new applications for their channel customers every year. And once they’ve served channel partners’ needs, they will set their eyes on larger businesses. Crucially, Blackwall has only scratched the surface of the expansive opportunity in North America and APAC.
Over the coming months, we will be supporting Nik, Denis and the Blackwall team in scaling their operations further as they continue to move fast and expand globally. This is a company addressing a huge market opportunity across the entire web, and we look forward to an extraordinary journey with Blackwall alongside our friends at MMC, as well as existing angels.
