Spur Intelligence Raises $200 Million to Strengthen Bot Detection Technology

Cybersecurity startup Spur Intelligence has secured $200 million in new funding led by Insight Partners as organisations face a surge in automated online traffic that is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from legitimate human activity.

Based in Lake Mary, Florida, Spur was founded in 2017 by two former U.S. Department of Defence engineers, years before generative AI tools such as ChatGPT accelerated the growth of sophisticated bots and AI agents.

The company develops technology that helps enterprises identify whether online activity is coming from real people or from automated systems. Its platform is designed to expose fake users, malicious bots and other cyber threats that can hide behind increasingly advanced anonymity tools.

According to Insight Partners, the rapid growth of criminal virtual private networks, residential proxy networks and other anonymisation services has made it much harder for organisations to understand who is actually accessing their systems.

“As sophisticated criminal VPNs, residential proxy networks, and anonymisation infrastructure proliferate, organisations are increasingly operating with a critical blind spot: they can see the activity, but not the infrastructure behind it,” Insight Partners Managing Director Thomas Krane said in a statement.

Identifying malicious online traffic has long been a challenge for security teams, but the rise of AI-powered automation has significantly increased the scale of the problem.

Cloudflare reported last month that bots now generate more internet traffic than humans, marking what the company described as the first time automated activity has overtaken human usage online.

Cloudflare founder and CEO Matthew Prince said the milestone arrived sooner than expected because of the rapid growth of agentic AI traffic, underscoring the increasing demand for technologies capable of separating legitimate users from automated systems.