• 2 min read
Spur raises $200 million as bot traffic surges
Spur Intelligence raised $200 million from Insight Partners as bots surpass humans in internet traffic, according to Cloudflare.
Image: TechCrunch
Spur Intelligence, a cybersecurity startup based in Lake Mary, Florida, has raised $200 million in a funding round led by Insight Partners. The company, founded in 2017 by two former Defense Department engineers, sells technology designed to help enterprises distinguish legitimate human users from increasingly difficult-to-detect bot traffic.
Image credits: Malte Mueller / Getty Images
Spur was founded five years before ChatGPT’s public launch, but its focus has become more urgent as criminal infrastructure makes automated activity harder to trace. The company’s technology is intended to help organizations identify fake users and threats by revealing signals behind traffic that may otherwise appear legitimate.
“As sophisticated criminal VPNs, residential proxy networks, and anonymization infrastructure proliferate, organizations are increasingly operating with a critical blind spot: they can see the activity, but not the infrastructure behind it.”
The infrastructure behind bot traffic
Corporate security teams have long worked to detect malicious traffic. Spur’s pitch centers on the infrastructure used to hide that traffic, including criminal VPNs, residential proxy networks, and anonymization systems.
Recommended reading
Hackers exploit FastJson zero-day against US firms
The company’s announcement comes as automated traffic reaches a new milestone. Cloudflare reported last month that bots were more active on the internet than humans as of mid-2026. Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s founder and CEO, said on X that the shift happened earlier than he expected as agentic traffic accelerated.
“Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history.”
The source does not disclose Spur’s valuation, how the company will use the new capital, or whether the round includes secondary sales. It also does not provide a product release date or technical benchmark for the startup’s detection system.
Security Editor
Sophia unpacks the invisible wars happening on our networks. Covering cybersecurity, privacy legislation, and cryptography, she exposes how our data is weaponized and defended. Before joining for(geeks), she spent years as a penetration tester. She's the reason the rest of the team uses physical security keys.
via TechCrunch
