IoT cybersecurity startup Exein today announced raising $270 million in an oversubscribed funding round that brings the total raised to over $600 million and its valuation to $1.7 billion.
The investment round was led by Headline, with participation from Sofina, Goldman Sachs, the European Investment Bank Group, KfW Capital, Balderton, Lakestar, and several other venture firms.
Founded in 2018, Italy-based Exein has built embedded and runtime security technology that targets vulnerabilities, attacks, and compliance issues in IoT devices.
The solution provides threat monitoring, detection, and containment, complemented by a kernel-level preemptive runtime security solution designed to block attacks before they execute.
Exein is now working on a proprietary foundation model specifically crafted for Physical AI security, trained on real-world machine activity.
The new agentic security architecture will power autonomous agents designed to protect systems at machine speed, Exein says.
The new funding will also allow the company to accelerate its global expansion, with a focus on the US market.
“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,” Exein founder and CEO Gianni Cuozzo said.
“Frontier models are pushing the patch window to zero. Attacks now happen at machine speed, so defense has to as well. Physical AI is the natural next step for Exein: we’re building machine-time security for machine-time attacks,” Cuozzo added.
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