Rome-based Exein has joined the unicorn club. The cybersecurity company announced a new $270 million funding round that takes its valuation to $1.7 billion: more than thirty times the $55 million of just two years ago, and a step up from the 170 million raised in 2025. The round is led by US fund Headline and closed significantly oversubscribed, the company said.
A round with European and US capital
- Headline, a US venture capital fund, leads the deal.
- Sofina, Goldman Sachs, the European Investment Bank Group through ETCI, the European Tech Champions Initiative, KfW Capital and T.Capital, Deutsche Telekom's corporate venture arm, also took part.
- Existing investors joined as well: Balderton, HV, Intrepid Growth Partners, 33N Ventures, Lakestar, Supernova Invest, Blue Cloud Ventures and Geodesic Capital.
- Alongside the equity round Exein upsized its revolving credit facility led by J.P. Morgan, with KfW joining as an additional lender, to fund acquisitions in Europe and the United States.
From firmware to intelligent machines
Exein was founded in Rome in 2018 by Gianni Cuozzo and chose a different path from traditional cybersecurity: rather than defending a network from the outside, its software sits inside the device firmware, monitors behaviour and detects anomalies from within.
- According to figures released by the company, its technology now runs on more than 2 billion devices.
- Sectors range from industrial automation and automotive to energy, healthcare, semiconductors, aerospace and robotics.
Photon and a foundation model for Physical AI
The new frontier is Physical AI: artificial intelligence embedded in machines that perceive, decide and act in the physical world, from robots and drones to autonomous vehicles.
- In March Exein launched Photon, a runtime security architecture that works at the kernel level and blocks malicious execution before it can do damage.
- The company is training a proprietary foundation model on two years of machine telemetry collected across its device footprint: data on how machines actually behave, unlike the human-generated text general-purpose models are trained on.
- The model will power autonomous security agents able to detect and counter threats at machine speed without waiting for human intervention. The agentic architecture is expected by the end of 2026, with the first foundation models due in the first quarter of 2027.
The threat grows, growth accelerates
Exein says it now detects around 5,000 new non-repetitive attacks a week across its network, five times the volume recorded a year ago. The stake is not only leaked data: as Exein points out, a compromised machine takes an action in the real world, be it a moving car, a power grid or healthcare equipment.
On the commercial side, revenue in the first half of 2026 was almost equal to the whole of 2025, and the company expects to quadruple last year's revenue over the full year.
International expansion
- After its December 2025 round, Exein established its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Taiwan and signed new partnerships in semiconductors, industrial computing and connected infrastructure.
- It has opened a legal entity in Japan, with expansion there planned for the fourth quarter of 2026, while a new office in South Korea is expected to open by 2027.
- In the United States the plan is to grow headcount, customers and partnerships over the next two years, opening an office in the San Francisco Bay Area.
- According to Tech.eu, around half of its revenue currently comes from Asia-Pacific.
Why it matters for the Italian ecosystem
For Italian venture capital Exein is a rare case: a deep tech company founded in Rome that reaches a billion-dollar valuation by attracting international capital. According to PitchBook data cited by Yahoo Finance, it is Europe's third most valuable cybersecurity startup, behind Terra Quantum and Nord Security, and this is the largest round closed in the sector this year. European venture funding for cybersecurity has reached 2.4 billion euros so far in 2026 and is on track to beat the 2025 total, with fewer deals and capital increasingly concentrated in larger ones.
Cuozzo told Corriere della Sera that in 2018 European venture capital mostly backed fast-to-scale models, from fintech to marketplaces, while a deep tech company needs two or three years of development, stress testing and certification before it can issue its first invoice: Exein, he recalls, spent five years as a research and development company with no revenue. Today the founder warns against confusing financial value with the goal: a valuation, he says, is not the end result but the market's summary of a company's present and future. The stated ambition is that no robot, drone or autonomous system goes into production without security able to operate at machine speed, and that the reference standard be set by a company born in Italy.
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