Exein raises $270M to secure the machines AI now lives in

Rome-based Exein has raised $270 million led by Headline at a $1.7 billion valuation, with Sofina, Goldman Sachs, the EIB Group and KfW Capital among the new backers, to secure the robots, drones and connected machines that AI is now moving into.

Europe still counts its cybersecurity champions on the fingers of one hand, and the biggest cheques in the category keep landing in Tel Aviv and Palo Alto – and yet this week a $270 million cyber cheque landed in Rome, for a company built on device firmware. Below, I lay out the round, the company behind it, the market it sells into, and the pattern it confirms.

Headline leads, Europe’s public capital follows

Exein announced the $270 million round on 15 September 2026, led by Headline. The new investors alongside it are Sofina, Goldman Sachs, the European Investment Bank Group through its European Tech Champions Initiative, KfW Capital and T.Capital; existing backers Balderton, HV Capital, Intrepid Growth Partners, 33N Ventures, Lakestar, Supernova Invest, Blue Cloud Ventures and Geodesic Capital all followed on, per the company’s announcement. The company did not label the stage; TechCrunch reads it as a Series D.

The valuation lands at $1.7 billion – a 30-fold increase on the Series B two years ago, per TechCrunch – and makes Exein Italy’s newest unicorn. The money goes to US and Asia-Pacific expansion, with a Bay Area office and a South Korean office planned by 2027 (Tech Funding News), a proprietary foundation model for physical AI security due in Q1 2027, and acquisitions to round out the product line (TechCrunch).

Two billion devices running Roman firmware

Founded in 2018 by Gianni Cuozzo, Exein puts security inside the device rather than around the network: runtime protection embedded at firmware level in robots, drones, vehicles, medical machines and industrial controllers. “Every device should be able to defend itself, regardless if they are connected to a secure network or not,” is how Cuozzo frames it to TechCrunch.

The traction numbers in the announcement are the real story. Exein’s technology now runs across more than 2 billion devices; first-half 2026 ARR came in four times higher than a year earlier; the network detects roughly 5,000 new, non-repetitive attacks every week; and about half of revenue already comes from Asia-Pacific. That last figure is rare for a European scale-up and explains the Seoul office before it opens. The round follows a €70 million Series C led by Balderton in July 2025, per the company’s own blog.

An $80bn market growing at 18.7%

The segment Exein sells into is being repriced by the same force that created it. The IoT security market stands at $28.67 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $80.30 billion by 2031, an 18.7% CAGR (MarketsandMarkets, March 2026). Every machine that gains a model gains an attack surface, and Cuozzo’s line to Silicon Republic – “right now, I think the hackers have the edge” – is the honest version of why the growth rate holds.

Our own records put the round in context. Fortaegis raised $50 million a day earlier to bake security into the silicon itself, and EUCLYD landed over €200 million the same day for European AI chips. Three hardware-level rounds in 48 hours is not a coincidence; it is Europe’s deeptech capital moving down the stack, and the running tally is on our fundraising data desk.

What a Roman unicorn signals for European deeptech

So what does it tell us that Italy’s newest unicorn is a firmware company? First, that the physical AI thesis now has a European security layer attached to it – the machines are being built here, in Germany’s factories and Italy’s robotics lines, and the protection is starting to be built here too. Second, look at the cap table: ETCI and KfW Capital sitting next to Goldman Sachs and Sofina in a late-stage European round. We spent years lamenting that our scale-ups had to cross the Atlantic for growth cheques; this week alone, the EU’s scaleup instruments showed up in Tandem Health’s Series B and in Exein’s round. The good news is that the machinery we kept asking for is finally writing wires, not white papers.

What to watch from here is specific: whether the Q1 2027 foundation model ships, which companies Exein buys with its M&A budget, and whether the Asia-Pacific revenue split survives the US push. A unicorn valuation is a promise, not a result – the fact remains that 2 billion devices and 4x ARR growth are results.

Rome was not on anyone’s map of European cyber capitals in 2018. It is now. Let’s keep putting new cities on that map!