TOKYO (AP) — Asian shares were mostly lower in cautious trading Tuesday after artificial-intelligence -related stocks bounced back on Wall Street while other sectors continued to be shaky and oil prices stayed high.
Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 declined 0.6% in early trading to 64,512.35. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 lost 0.8% to 8,772.10. South Korea's Kospi dropped 2.8% to 5,605.31. Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell nearly 1.0% to 23,947.37, while the Shanghai Composite was little changed at 3,732.29.
Analysts say investors are also waiting for the upcoming slew of earnings reports from various major companies.
On Wall Street, the S&P 500 rose 0.4%, coming off its worst week since June, and the Nasdaq composite rallied 1.1%. The majority of U.S. stocks outside of AI and tech fell, though, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average finished with a 0.1% drop.
Nvidia added 1.4% Monday and was one of the strongest forces lifting the S&P 500. Because it’s the largest stock on Wall Street by total market value, a 1% move for its stock has more effect on the index than any other’s.
SpaceX, which controls the xAI business, rose 1.3%. Its founder, Elon Musk, has pledged to give one share of SpaceX to “every kid in America” next year.
All told, the S&P 500 rose 31.29 points to 7,690.73. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped 36.38 to 51,966.03, and the Nasdaq composite rallied 290.85 to 26,430.89.
Much of the spending on AI chips and data centers has been funded with borrowed money, and Treasury yields in the bond market recently hit their highest levels in years. The yield on the 10-year Treasury climbed to 5.14% from 5.09% late Friday.
In energy trading, benchmark U.S. crude rose 0.15% to $103.50 a barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, inched up 0.07% to $109.47 a barrel. Uncertainty about when the war with Iran will allow the energy industry to return to normal means oil prices are unlikely to ease any time soon.
In currency trading, the U.S. dollar inched down to 158.45 Japanese yen from 158.46 yen. The euro cost $1.1225, little changed from $1.1227.
AP Business Writer Stan Choe contributed to this report.
Yuri Kageyama is on Threads: https://www.threads.com/@yurikageyama
People stand in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei index at a securities firm Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
A person walks in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei index at a securities firm Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
A person walks in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei index at a securities firm Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct 20, 2026--
Blackwall today announced it has raised $100 million at a valuation of $2.2 billion. This C Round was led by AVP, who join existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261020736847/en/
The new round of financing accelerates Blackwall's objective to build a global traffic management ecosystem around its hosting-provider network. By connecting providers, infrastructure and technology, Blackwall aims to provide greater control over how internet traffic is managed, secured and monetized.
Blackwall will use the investment to scale its global presence across the web traffic management market, establishing and expanding operations across 12 strategic regions spanning North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East.
Currently spanning bot mitigation, DDoS protection, web application firewall, load balancing, server-side encryption and management of agentic AI traffic which is rapidly taking over the Internet, Blackwall is deployed inside the web hosting providers’ own infrastructure, identifying real visitors and legitimate automated traffic from malicious bots, attacks and traffic abuse, filtering billions of requests per day.
The new funding will also be leveraged to expand Blackwall’s platform, introducing new traffic security capabilities for the hosting market that enable hosting, cloud and managed service providers to address a broader share of their customers' traffic management needs through a single infrastructure layer.
"The web is becoming more automated, more distributed and more complex, but the infrastructure that powers it remains highly fragmented," said Nikita Rozenberg, Co-Founder and CEO of Blackwall. "Our ambition is to build the traffic management ecosystem that brings those worlds together. This funding allows us to expand globally, deepen our platform and give hosting and infrastructure providers the technology they need to participate in the next generation of the web."
Blackwall partners with web hosting, managed service and cloud providers that run much of the web. Hosting is a $200 billion market, and a fragmented one, because infrastructure has to stay close to the businesses it serves; for most of the web, the provider is the only route to a site at scale. Unlike the hyperscale and content-delivery platforms that compete with providers for their own customers, Blackwall sits inside the provider's infrastructure and strengthens the relationship between the provider and the businesses it hosts.
For web hosting providers the economics of Blackwall’s platform work in two ways. First, Blackwall stops unwanted traffic before it reaches their servers, cutting infrastructure and operating costs and making their customers' sites faster. Second, with the modular nature of Blackwall’s customer-facing web security features, providers can package, bundle and tier its components as products of their own, earning new revenue without building or maintaining the technology themselves.
"Blackwall has built something rare: a security company that grows with the internet itself," said Warda Shaheen, General Partner at AVP. "It is already the layer in front of millions of websites, and as more of the web's traffic comes from agents, the company in that position becomes indispensable. That's why we're leading this round."
Norman Fiore, General Partner at Dawn Capital, commented: “A tsunami of agents will overwhelm infrastructure optimised for human traffic. Nik and Denis are already delivering to their millions of customers the infrastructure optimised for the coming agentic web, and commercial success will flow to those businesses that are retooling today.”
Mina Samaan, General Partner, MMC Ventures, added: "We've backed Blackwall from its early days and have seen the business scale into critical infrastructure for the web. As AI changes how traffic moves across the internet, Blackwall's position at the front door of millions of websites has never been more important."
Stanislav Ivanov, Founding Partner, Tera Ventures: “Nik and Denis combine real grit, deep technical knowledge and a rare grasp of where the opportunity lies and how to capture it. Blackwall, now protecting millions of websites, is exactly the kind of born-global company Tera exists to back. We were their first believers, backing them from day one through the early years of building the product and winning its first partners and customers. This round shows we’re far from the last.”
About Blackwall
Blackwall is building the global web traffic management ecosystem, enabling hosting, cloud and managed service providers to manage, secure and optimize traffic across their entire customer base. Through a single integration, Blackwall gives providers a scalable platform to deliver and monetize security, performance and traffic management services while retaining control of their infrastructure and customer relationships. Built to grow with its partners, Blackwall is expanding its platform and global footprint to become the technology partner behind the service providers that power the web. Blackwall is backed by AVP, Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures.
About AVP
AVP is an independent global investment platform dedicated to high-growth, tech (from deep-tech to tech-enabled) companies across Europe and North America, managing more than €2.5bn of assets across venture and growth strategies. Its multi-stage platform combines global research with local execution to drive investment. Since its establishment in 2016, AVP has invested in more than 80 technology companies. Beyond providing equity capital, its expansion team works closely with founders, providing the expertise, connections, and resources needed to unlock growth opportunities and create lasting value through meaningful collaborations.
About Dawn Capital
Dawn is Europe's leading specialist B2B software investor, with assets under management of over $2bn. Dawn is primarily an early-stage investor, backing companies from Series A and B, and continuing to fund the top-performing through growth rounds to exit. Its roster of investments includes Mimecast (formerly NASDAQ-listed, taken private by Permira in a $5.8bn transaction), iZettle (sold to PayPal for $2.2bn cash), Tink (purchased by Visa for $2.0bn), LeanIX (acquired by SAP), as well as current market leaders, Collibra, Dataiku, Quantexa, Soldo, and Copper, amongst others.
Dawn is currently investing from Dawn Capital V, the firm's $620m fifth flagship fund, and Dawn Opportunities Fund, an $80m fund to enable Dawn to double down on its best performing companies to exit.
About MMC Ventures
MMC is a leading European venture capital firm with a research-driven approach. It invests in early-stage transformative technology companies that utilize AI and data science across sectors including enterprise AI, fintech, data-driven health and cloud & data infrastructure. Examples of companies MMC has backed include: Synthesia, Copper, Signal AI, Interactive Investor, Current Health, YuLife and Cloudsmith.
About Tera Ventures
Tera Ventures is a Tallinn-based seed-stage venture capital firm and one of the longest-running seed investors in the Nordic and Baltic region. Tera backs born-global founders from the Nordics, the Baltics and Central and Eastern Europe. It invests with high conviction, often as a company’s first institutional backer, and stays alongside founders well beyond the first cheque, including through the toughest stretches of building a company.
Blackwall founders Denis Prochko and Nikita Rozenberg (L-R)
