Italian cybersecurity startup Exein SpA today announced that it has raised $270 million at a valuation of $1.7 billion to build security for robots, vehicles and other machines that run artificial intelligence.

The company described the round as significantly oversubscribed. Exein was valued at $700 million as recently as December, when it closed a €100 million round, according to TechCrunch.

The Rome-based company has been around since 2018, and its early work centered on putting security software inside the firmware of internet of things devices so they could protect themselves without leaning on the network around them. The idea, founder and Chief Executive Gianni Cuozzo told TechCrunch, is that “every device should be able to defend itself.”

More than 2 billion devices now carry Exein’s code, in sectors that include automotive, energy and robotics. Photon, released earlier this year, runs at the operating system kernel and is meant to stop malicious code before it executes.

Across that installed base, Exein said, it now sees about 5,000 new, nonrepetitive attacks a week, five times the level of a year ago. Frontier models are “pushing the patch window to zero,” Cuozzo said. In his view, defense now has to run at the same machine speed as the attacks.

Two years of telemetry from those devices is being used to train a proprietary foundation model for physical AI security. An agentic security architecture is due to ship by the end of the year, and the first of the foundation models should follow in the first quarter of 2027.

Asia-Pacific accounts for around half of Exein’s revenue, and the company said annual recurring revenue in the first half of the year came in at four times the level of a year earlier. Exein has set up a regional headquarters in Taiwan and a legal entity in Japan, where it plans to expand in the fourth quarter, and a South Korea office is slated to open by 2027.

Exein named the U.S. as a priority for the new capital, and an office in the Bay Area will open as part of that push. Acquisitions in Europe and the U.S. are another use for the money. To help pay for those deals, Exein has upsized a revolving credit facility that JPMorgan Chase & Co. leads, and German state development bank KfW has come in as an additional lender.

Headline Management GmbH led the round, and partner Clarey Zhu said securing the physical world “will become one of the defining cybersecurity challenges of the next decade” as AI moves into robots, vehicles and critical infrastructure. The rest of the investor list runs to 13 names. New backers Sofina SA, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the European Investment Bank Group through its European Tech Champions Initiative, KfW Capital GmbH & Co. KG and T.Capital came in alongside existing investors Balderton Capital, HV Capital, Intrepid Growth Partners, 33N Ventures, Lakestar, Supernova Invest, Blue Cloud Ventures and Geodesic Capital.

Investors have now put more than $600 million into Exein, according to SecurityWeek.

Image: Exein