Spur Intelligence, a Florida-based cybersecurity startup, has raised $200 million in funding led by Insight Partners to expand its bot-detection technology, which helps businesses tell genuine human users apart from disguised automated traffic. The deal comes as companies face a mounting challenge in identifying malicious or fake activity amid a surge of sophisticated tools such as criminal VPNs, residential proxy networks and anonymisation infrastructure that increasingly mask bot behaviour online.

Spur was founded in 2017 by two former US Defense Department engineers, well before the rise of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, giving it an early head start in the field. Insight Partners' Thomas Krane said organisations can often see suspicious activity but not the infrastructure behind it, underscoring the "blind spot" Spur aims to address. The investment follows a Cloudflare report last month showing that, as of mid-2026, bot traffic on the internet has for the first time overtaken human traffic, a shift its chief executive Matthew Prince said arrived far sooner than expected.