Bot detection startup Spur has secured $200 million 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 technology helps organizations distinguish between legitimate human users and increasingly hidden bot traffic to help identify fake users and threats.

“With the proliferation of sophisticated criminal VPNs, residential proxy networks, and anonymizing infrastructure, organizations are increasingly operating with a critical blind spot: they can see the activity, but not the infrastructure behind it,” Insight’s Thomas Crane said in a written statement.

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

“I thought it would be the end of 2027, then early 2027, but proxy traffic is growing so fast that bots have now surpassed human online traffic for the first time in internet history,” Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s founder and CEO, posted on X last month, referring to his company’s latest traffic report.