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Exein raises $270M at $1.7B valuation to secure robots and vehicles running AI

Italian physical AI security startup Exein has raised $270 million at a $1.7 billion valuation to expand firmware-level defenses for robots, vehicles and other connected machines.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-16 08:25

The round was led by Headline Management GmbH and was significantly oversubscribed, the Rome-based company said. New investors include 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, joining existing backers Balderton Capital, HV Capital, Intrepid Growth Partners, 33N Ventures, Lakestar, Supernova Invest, Blue Cloud Ventures and Geodesic Capital. SecurityWeek reported that investors have now put more than $600 million into the company.

TechCrunch reported that Exein was valued at $700 million as recently as December, when it closed a €100 million round.

Founded in 2018, Exein began by embedding security software in the firmware of internet of things devices so they could defend themselves without leaning on the network around them. Founder and Chief Executive Gianni Cuozzo told TechCrunch the principle 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, non-repetitive attacks a week, five times the level of a year ago. Cuozzo said frontier models are "pushing the patch window to zero," and that 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. It 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 United States as a priority for the new capital, and a Bay Area office will open as part of that push. Acquisitions in Europe and the United States are another use for the money. To help pay for those deals, Exein has upsized a revolving credit facility that JPMorgan Chase & Co. leads, with German state development bank KfW joining as an additional lender.

Clarey Zhu, a partner at Headline, 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.