Bot-detection startup Spur raises $200M from Insight Partners

Spur Intelligence, a cybersecurity startup based in Lake Mary, Florida, has raised a $200 million round led by Insight Partners. The company’s technology helps enterprises tell legitimate human users apart from increasingly well-hidden bot traffic, so its customers can flag fake users and other threats before they cause damage.

Spur was founded in 2017 by two former Defense Department engineers — five years before ChatGPT’s public launch — a timing the company now frames as prescient. What began as a narrow security niche, telling real visitors from automated ones, has turned into one of the defining fights in enterprise cybersecurity as bot traffic and AI agents proliferate across the internet.

As sophisticated criminal VPNs, residential proxy networks, and anonymization infrastructure proliferate, organizations increasingly can see the activity on their networks but not the infrastructure generating it, Insight’s Thomas Krane said in a written statement. That blind spot — from visible activity to invisible infrastructure — is exactly what Spur’s technology is built to close, and it is the thesis underpinning the new funding: mapping the infrastructure behind the traffic rather than just the traffic itself.

The scale of the problem facing corporate security teams has shifted. As of mid-2026, bots are more active on the internet than humans, according to a Cloudflare report cited last month. Cloudflare founder and CEO Matthew Prince pointed to his company’s latest traffic data in a post on X last month, noting that the crossover arrived earlier than he expected: “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.”

Detecting malicious traffic is a problem corporate security teams have wrestled with for decades. But the current wave, driven by increasingly sophisticated automated infrastructure, is different in both scale and speed from anything security teams have faced before. Spur’s $200 million round reflects investor conviction that distinguishing bots from humans is becoming core enterprise infrastructure, not a specialized add-on, as the volume of non-human traffic keeps climbing and criminal actors increasingly hide behind residential proxy networks and anonymization tools rather than obvious automation.

Why it matters

With bots now more active online than humans, enterprises face a structural shift in what counts as legitimate traffic — and cybersecurity vendors that can map the infrastructure behind that traffic, not just flag the activity, are positioned to become essential infrastructure themselves.