Spur raises $200 million after years of bootstrapping internet traffic intelligence
Insight Partners is backing two former Defense Department engineers as bots and proxy networks make IP addresses harder to trust.
By Ryan Merket · Published
Why it matters
Spur turned specialized IP intelligence into a revenue-funded security operation before taking $200 million. Insight is betting that AI agents and proxy networks will make traffic attribution a core enterprise control. ([spur.us](https://spur.us/news/insight-partners-spur-intelligence-investment?ref=runtimewire))
Spur Intelligence raised $200 million from Insight Partners on July 28, giving co-founders Ethan Smith and Riley Kilmer outside capital after years of bootstrapping their internet traffic intelligence operation. The investment was reported by TechCrunch and confirmed in Spur's announcement.
Smith and Kilmer were Defense Department engineers before starting Spur in 2017. A LinkedIn post from Rabbi Rob T. says Kilmer made the decision after an October 2017 lunch about whether to take another startup job. She brought the idea to Smith, and the pair filed Spur's paperwork on November 13 of that year. Their original mission centered on stopping fraud hidden by anonymity services, years before generative AI agents added another source of automated traffic to the internet.
The Lake Mary, Florida-based operation now sells IP intelligence that helps security and fraud teams identify the infrastructure behind a connection. Spur analyzes VPNs, residential proxies, mobile gateways, botnets and other anonymization services, then delivers that context through APIs, on-premise data feeds, session enrichment tools and integrations.
Spur is narrower than the bot-management platforms implied by the financing headline. Spur does not operate as a content delivery network, web application firewall or CAPTCHA provider. Its role is to tell customers what sits behind an IP address so those customers can decide whether to allow, investigate or block a session.
A bootstrap story meets a scale check
The $200 million check follows a long stretch in which Smith and Kilmer financed Spur through revenue. A Washington and Lee University event page described Spur in April 2025 as approaching $15 million in annual recurring revenue without outside investment. The same page, where Smith was scheduled as a keynote speaker, said Spur protected more than half of the Fortune 50. Those customer and revenue figures were not accompanied by a named customer list or financial statements.
That revenue marker is more than a year old, but it gives the round useful scale: Insight's investment is over 13 times the nearly $15 million ARR figure cited in April 2025. Spur says ARR grew 42% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, alongside 210% growth in new business and 109% net revenue retention. The metrics are self-reported, and Spur did not provide the underlying revenue figure in its July 15 growth release.
The sequence matters. Spur published the growth figures two weeks before announcing the financing, giving Insight a clear case for funding expansion rather than initial product discovery. Spur's announcement says the money will support product development, intelligence coverage, integrations and enterprise operations. Smith currently serves as chief strategy officer, while Kilmer is chief innovation officer.
Spur says the investment will be spread across product development, intelligence coverage, integrations and enterprise operations. That broad mandate suggests Insight is financing a shift from a founder-built specialist vendor into a larger security data platform. Spur has not attached specific hiring, acquisition or geographic targets to the round.
Selling context beneath the bot fight
Spur's product is built around a basic problem: an IP address that appears residential or mobile can belong to a real customer, a fraudster routing through someone else's device, or an automated agent using proxy infrastructure to resemble a person.
Traditional IP reputation tools often assign a risk score or identify a rough location and network owner. Spur says its records include more than 20 attributes, including geography, autonomous system number, device and connection type, proxy or VPN attribution, and the entry and exit points of a tunnel. Spur's comparison page claims coverage of over 60 million concurrently active anonymous IPs and more than 1,000 active VPN and proxy services.
Spur has priced the product to reach customers well below the enterprise tier. Its pricing page lists a free community plan, a Teams plan beginning at $200 per month and a Pro plan beginning at $1,600 per month. Enterprise pricing is negotiated. That range gives Spur a path to put its data into smaller security teams while reserving on-premise feeds, large usage volumes and custom integrations for bigger contracts.
The competitive field spans several established security categories. Spur's own comparison page names IP data providers such as IPinfo and Digital Element, fraud and bot-management vendors including Arkose Labs, Human and DataDome, and edge infrastructure providers such as Cloudflare, Akamai and Fastly. Spur's pitch is that deeper attribution of proxy and anonymization infrastructure can improve decisions made by those other systems.
Why the timing works for Insight
Automated traffic has moved from a security nuisance to a dominant share of web activity. Cloudflare said in June that bots generated roughly 57% of web requests, surpassing human activity for the first time in its measurements. The figure includes legitimate automation as well as malicious bots, an important distinction for vendors selling detection.
That distinction creates Spur's opening. Online services cannot block automation as a category when search crawlers, shopping agents, software integrations and customer-controlled AI tools also depend on automated access. Security teams need infrastructure and session context to separate permitted machines, suspicious machines and humans whose connections merely look unusual.
Thomas Krane, an Insight managing director, framed the investment around that missing context. Organizations can observe suspicious activity, he said in Spur's announcement, while remaining unable to identify the VPN, residential proxy or anonymization infrastructure carrying it.
Smith and Kilmer spent nearly nine years building data for that layer before accepting the Insight check. The financing gives Spur resources to widen coverage and enterprise distribution at the moment AI agents are making the identity behind every internet session less obvious. It also changes the operating test for the founders: Spur must convert a $200 million investment into a larger category without losing the technical specificity that made a bootstrapped security product valuable in the first place.