Italian AI security company Exein raises $270m to fund global expansion

Exein, an Italian startup that aims to use AI to defend against cyberattacks on AI-powered real-world devices, has raised $270 million in a funding round that will fuel its expansion into Asia-Pacific (APAC) and the US.

The oversubscribed funding round was led by venture capital fund Headline, with participation from a range of investors including the European Investment bank and Goldman Sachs. It valued the company at $1.7 billion.

Exein’s raise comes as it claims to be experiencing around 5,000 new, non-repetitive attacks a week against its network of two billion devices, fuelled by AI. When these devices are compromised, Exein said, they do not simply pose a data breach risk but a psychical one, as they include devices such as healthcare equipment, autonomous vehicles and smart power grids.

Gianni Cuozzo, founder and chief executive of Exein, said: “AI is moving out of the cloud and into the physical world, and this is the transition Exein was built for. We’ve developed deep expertise in how machines operate, invested heavily in the technology needed to protect them and built a global footprint that gives us an understanding of machines at a scale few others can match.

“Frontier models are pushing the patch window to zero. Attacks now happen at machine speed, so defence has to as well. Physical AI is the natural next step for Exein: we’re building machine-time security for machine-time attacks.”

Alongside its funding raise, the company has upsized its revolving credit facility, led by JP Morgan, adding Germany’s KfW as an additional lender. The company said it will use these funds to pursue merger and acquisition deals across Europe and the US.

The company is already expanding rapidly, having established its APAC headquarters in Taiwan since its last funding round, as well as opening a legal entity in Japan with plans to move into South Korea by late 2027.

In the US, the company will use the funding to grow its team and open a new office in California’s Bay Area.

AI-powered cyber attacks are an increasing fear in the technology industry, with major developers OpenAI and Anthropic each working to release models that can detect vulnerabilities in systems before hackers exploit them.

The latest of these, OpenAI’s Astra, is described by the company as the first to meet the definition of “critical cyber capabilities”, meaning it can identify and develop working zero-day exploits in real-world environments without human intervention.