Rome’s Exein has raised €234M ($270M) at a €1.4B ($1.7B) valuation, capital it will spend embedding security inside the robots, drones and vehicles that now run AI models in the physical world.
Headline led the round, with Sofina, Goldman Sachs, the European Investment Bank Group through ETCI, KfW Capital and T.Capital joining as new participants. Returning backers Balderton, HV, Lakestar, Intrepid Growth Partners, 33N Ventures, Supernova Invest, Blue Cloud Ventures and Geodesic Capital also committed. J.P. Morgan also upsized an existing revolving credit facility, with KfW added as a lender.
The premise is that a device should be able to defend itself whether or not the network around it can be trusted. Photon, its runtime offering, sits at kernel level and stops malicious code from executing before an intrusion starts. Founder and CEO Gianni Cuozzo argues that as frontier models shrink the patching window toward zero, attacks land at machine speed and defenses must keep pace.
The company says its software now ships on more than two billion devices. Customers sit in aerospace, industrial automation, automotive manufacturing, energy, healthcare, semiconductors and robotics. First-half 2026 recurring revenue quadrupled year over year, the round was heavily oversubscribed, and the valuation has climbed thirty-fold in two years. Asia-Pacific supplies roughly half of the top line, with staff across Europe, Asia-Pacific and the US.
The next bet is a foundation model trained on how machines behave rather than on human-written text, powering autonomous security agents. An agentic security architecture is slated to arrive before 2027 begins, with the company’s first foundation models following in the opening quarter of 2027. About 5,000 fresh, non-repeating intrusions land on Exein’s network every week, five times the rate of a year earlier. The cash pays for acquisitions and hiring as the firm pushes into the US and Asia-Pacific.
