Exein, A Startup from Rome, Raises $270 Million and Becomes a Physical AI Unicorn

Exein just turned a big funding round into a bigger signal. The Rome-based cybersecurity company raised $270 million in its Series C and says the deal values it at $1.7 billion, which puts it at the top of Europe’s cybersecurity scaleups by valuation.

The round drew a familiar mix of names and new money alike. Sofina, Goldman Sachs, the European Investment Bank Group through the European Tech Champions Initiative, the Wachstumsfonds Deutschland advised by KfW Capital, and Deutsche Telekom’s T.Capital all came in, while existing backers such as Balderton, HV, Intrepid Growth Partners, 33N Ventures, Lakestar, Supernova Invest, Blue Cloud Ventures and Geodesic Capital followed on. Exein says demand was strong enough that the round was significantly oversubscribed. At the same time, its revolving credit facility led by J.P. Morgan is being expanded, with KfW joining as an additional lender.

The company is selling a very specific pitch: security for machines that make decisions on the edge, not in the cloud. That means industrial robots, drones, autonomous vehicles, medical equipment, and energy and semiconductor infrastructure. Exein says its software is already deployed on more than two billion connected devices. Its Photon runtime security architecture, introduced earlier this year, works at the kernel level and is meant to stop malicious code before it can run. That matters when systems have to react in milliseconds and a human can’t realistically jump in.

The growth story is doing a lot of work here, and it’s not subtle. Exein says its valuation is up 30-fold in two years, and that first-half 2026 ARR was four times higher than in the same period a year earlier. Around half of revenue comes from Asia-Pacific, with Europe and the United States making up the rest. Since its last funding round in December of last year, it has opened APAC headquarters in Taiwan.

And the company is already pushing past defense into automation. Exein says it has been building its own foundation model for two years, trained on telemetry from its installed base, and plans to use that to drive autonomous security agents. The agentic security architecture is due by the end of 2026, with foundation models announced for the first quarter of 2027. It also says it now sees about 5,000 new, non-repeating attacks per week across its network, five times a year earlier. Fresh capital is going toward the US and Asia-Pacific, more staff, more customers, more partnerships, a San Francisco Bay Area office, and maybe acquisitions. There’s also a German office in Karlsruhe, because apparently Rome alone is not enough when you’re building the guardrails for physical AI.