TechCrunch — AI · July 28, 2026 · 2 min read

Bot-detection startup Spur nabs $200M from Insight

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In Brief

Posted:

2:29 PM PDT · July 28, 2026

render of LLM AI bot reading multiple books at once — **Image Credits:**Malte Mueller / Getty Images

Julie Bort

Bot-detection startup Spur nabs $200M from Insight

Spur Intelligence, a cybersecurity startup based in Lake Mary, Florida, has raised a $200 million round led by Insight Partners.

Spur, founded by two former Defense Department engineers in 2017 — five years before ChatGPT’s public launch — was prescient. The startup’s tech helps enterprises distinguish legitimate human users from increasingly well-hidden bot traffic to help identify fake users and threats.

“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,” Insight’s Thomas Krane said in a written statement.

Detecting malicious traffic has, of course, been a hill corporate security teams have been climbing for eons. But nothing compares to the onslaught facing them today. As of mid-2026, bots are now more active on the internet than humans are, Cloudflare reported last month.

“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,” Cloudflare founder and CEO Matthew Prince posted on X last month, pointing to his company’s latest traffic report.

Topics

AI, cybersecurity startups, Fundraising, Insight Partners, Startups, TC