The internet has a bot problem. Or maybe it's more accurate to say the internet is a bot problem now.
When Spur Intelligence announced a $200 million growth investment from Insight Partners on July 28, the Florida-based cybersecurity firm didn't have to work hard to make the case for why anyone should care. Bots now generate more than 53% of all web traffic, according to Imperva's most recent Bad Bot Report—a milestone that should probably worry us more than it does. For the first time, automated traffic has officially surpassed human activity online.
Kevin Hickey, Spur's CEO, knows the statistic cold. He also knows that when the threats are proliferating this fast, timing matters. Just weeks before the funding closed, his company's research made uncomfortable headlines: 42% of apps running on LG's webOS smart TV platform contained residential proxy software development kits. Translation? Millions of consumer televisions had been quietly repurposed as nodes in proxy networks, their owners none the wiser.
Cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs amplified the findings. LG suspended the offending apps. And Spur, a company most people outside enterprise security circles had never heard of, suddenly had a spotlight.
Follow the Money
Insight Partners led the round—$200 million is not a small bet—but Spur declined to disclose its valuation or whether other backers joined. Thomas Krane, a managing director at Insight, offered the expected statement about "significant market opportunity" in IP intelligence as organizations wrestle with increasingly sophisticated anonymized traffic. He's not wrong, exactly. The question is whether the opportunity is as clean-cut as venture capital press releases make it sound.
Spur says it will funnel the capital into product development, expanding intelligence coverage, building integrations with enterprise platforms, and scaling operations. The company also reported 109% net revenue retention in a mid-July update, though that figure hasn't been independently audited. (Worth noting: high retention rates are table stakes in enterprise software, but they don't tell you much about absolute revenue scale or profitability.)
What This Company Actually Does
Spur Intelligence, founded in November 2017 and based in Lake Mary, Florida, sits in the unsexy-but-essential corner of cybersecurity: IP intelligence. The platform identifies traffic that's been anonymized, proxied, or otherwise obscured—VPNs, residential proxies, mobile gateways, botnets. It does this through APIs, on-premises data feeds, and session enrichment tools that plug into existing security workflows.
The scale is notable, if their numbers hold up. Spur tracks more than 60 million active anonymous IP addresses and monitors over 1,000 VPN and proxy services, delivering more than 20 attributes per IP: geolocation, ASN data, proxy attribution, behavioral markers. Customers span banking (trying to reduce account takeovers), online gaming (detecting proxy abuse), e-commerce (preventing scalping bots), and SaaS platforms (stopping fraudulent sign-ups before they metastasize).
One technology customer, unnamed in case studies, reportedly blocked 90% of fraudulent sign-ups and saw a sevenfold improvement in true-positive identification. A financial services client cut successful account takeover attempts by more than 40%. Impressive, if you're the CISO trying to justify budget. Less impressive if you're a consumer wondering why this is still such a pervasive problem.
Integrations matter in this world, perhaps more than the founders initially expected. Spur plugs into major security information and event management platforms—Splunk has an official enrichment app, and there are hooks into Microsoft Sentinel, Anomali, and Palo Alto's Cortex XSOAR. Edge integrations run through Cloudflare, Akamai, and Fastly.
The Smart TV Moment
The LG revelations weren't Spur's first brush with publicity, but they were the loudest. Ethan Smith, co-founder and chief strategy officer (and a former software engineer at the U.S. Department of Defense from 2010 to 2016), appeared on CBS News in July discussing the proxy issue. The company also published its 2026 IP Intelligence Study in May, though it didn't generate the same buzz as televisions-turned-proxy-nodes.
Context matters here. Akamai research shows AI bot activity surged 300% in 2025, a staggering jump that's expanding the attack surface for enterprises already drowning in credential stuffing, web scraping, and garden-variety fraud. Imperva's latest report hammers home the bigger point: bot traffic isn't just growing, it's diversifying. Agentic AI bots—systems that can adapt and learn—are adding new layers of complexity that older defenses weren't built to handle.
Which brings us to the competitive landscape. It's crowded. HUMAN Security, Arkose Labs, DataDome, Kasada—all play in bot mitigation, though they approach the problem differently. Then there are IP data providers like MaxMind and IPinfo. Spur's pitch, at least according to its own materials, is that it focuses specifically on anonymization detection rather than broader bot management, and that its integrations embed directly into security operations workflows instead of requiring yet another dashboard to monitor.
Whether that's a meaningful distinction or just good positioning is hard to say from the outside.
Where the Money Goes Next
Spur is expanding coverage of AI-originated traffic, a feature it announced back in March. The platform now flags infrastructure associated with AI services and enables real-time session decisions based on enrichment data—necessary, given how much generative AI is being weaponized for automated attacks.
The company runs a remote-first operation and claims a customer renewal rate above 95%, though it hasn't disclosed employee headcount or revenue figures. Leadership includes President and COO Brendan Evers, co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer Riley Kilmer, CTO Alastair Parr, and CFO James Ray. Hickey, the CEO, has been with the company since its earliest days.
For Insight Partners, this deal adds another cybersecurity asset to a portfolio that's stayed busy throughout the year. The firm manages over $90 billion in regulatory assets under management (as of the end of last year) and has made a habit of growth-stage bets across enterprise software and security infrastructure.
Hickey told reporters the investment will help Spur "accelerate our mission to provide the most comprehensive IP intelligence available." It's the kind of statement CEOs are contractually obligated to make after a funding round. Whether it's enough to stay ahead in a market where the threats themselves are evolving faster than the defenses—well, that's the question everyone in this business is trying to answer.
And the bots, for their part, aren't slowing down.
