Italian cybersecurity company Exein has raised $270m at a valuation of $1.7bn as it expands its security technology from connected devices into robots, autonomous vehicles and other AI-enabled machines.
The funding round, led by Headline with participation from existing and new investors including Sofina, Goldman Sachs and the European Investment Bank Group, will support Exein’s expansion in the US and Asia-Pacific and the development of security technology for what the company calls Physical AI.
Exein says its technology is deployed across more than two billion connected devices in sectors including industrial automation, automotive, energy, healthcare, semiconductors, aerospace and robotics. Its annual recurring revenue in the first half of 2026 was four times higher than a year earlier.
The company argues that the growing use of AI in physical machines is creating a different cybersecurity challenge, as attacks and defensive responses increasingly need to operate at machine speed.
Earlier this year, Exein launched Photon, a runtime security architecture designed to operate at kernel level and block malicious code execution before it can run.
Exein is now developing a foundation model for Physical AI security, trained on machine telemetry generated through its technology across more than two billion devices. The company says this provides a different training dataset from the predominantly human-generated data used by general-purpose AI models.
The planned system is intended to support autonomous security agents that can detect and respond to threats without waiting for human intervention. Exein expects to introduce its agentic security architecture by the end of 2026, followed by its first foundation models in the first quarter of 2027.
The company says it is now seeing around 5,000 new, non-repetitive attacks across its network each week, five times the level recorded a year ago.
Exein’s valuation has increased thirtyfold over the past two years, according to the company. Around half of its revenue currently comes from Asia-Pacific, and it has operations in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the US.
The new funding will finance further hiring and customer and partnership development in the US, including a planned office in the San Francisco Bay Area. Exein also plans to pursue acquisitions as it expands its security platform.
“AI is moving out of the Cloud and into the physical world, and this is the transition Exein was built for,” said Gianni Cuozzo, founder and CEO of Exein.
The funding comes as manufacturers face growing pressure to secure connected products throughout their lifecycles. The EU Cyber Resilience Act‘s reporting obligations became applicable on 11th September, with its main manufacturer obligations due to take effect in December 2027.
