A Rome Startup Is Worth 1.7 Billion Dollars After Seven Years Working on Something Nobody Sees: the Security of Two Billion Devices

The Italian startup Exein has raised 270 million dollars (around 245 million euros) in a round led by Headline, at an estimated valuation of 1.7 billion dollars. Europe has another unicorn, and it is not in London, Berlin or Paris - it is in Rome, at a company working on something nobody wants to look at while it is working: device security.

The idea was set down back in 2018 and is simple to the point of sounding obvious once you hear it. "Exein's concept is that every device should be able to defend itself, regardless of whether it is connected to a secure network or not," says Gianni Cuozzo, the company's chief executive and founder. The newest product, Photon, blocks attacks at the level of the device kernel - meaning in a place no antivirus on the user's side can reach.

The numbers behind it are not marketing. Exein claims to have secured over 2 billion connected devices in sectors where one successful attack means production stops: aerospace, industrial automation, the car industry, energy, healthcare, semiconductors. Instead of selling software to end users, the company works directly with manufacturers and chip suppliers - a decision taken seven years ago, when connected devices were still a novelty.

The growth is what drew the investors. The estimated valuation is thirty times higher than at the Series B round around two years ago, and more than double that of December 2025, when the company took on both equity and debt. The round, Exein says, was significantly oversubscribed. Cuozzo claims the company is growing "400 percent year on year" - a figure nobody sustains for long, but while it lasts it opens every door.

Now comes the part you rarely read in funding announcements. The same artificial intelligence that created demand for Exein's product has also increased the power of attacks. Cuozzo points out that open models running without safeguards make attacks on physical devices cheaper and easier than ever. The company is already recording a rise in what it calls "machine-speed attacks" and is preparing its own foundation model for physical AI security, planned for the first quarter of 2027.

European regulation here, for a change, works in a European company's favour. The EU's Cyber Resilience Act introduced reporting obligations last week and comes fully into force in December 2027 - requiring manufacturers to guarantee that every digital product is protected against cyber threats. In other words, Brussels wrote Exein a client list.

Half the company's revenue today comes from Asia and the Pacific, and the fresh money is going towards buying smaller firms and hiring in the US and that region. Cuozzo says being spread across three continents has been his biggest problem so far. That is a nice problem to have when you founded a company in a country that spent decades watching its best engineers leave for somewhere else.

And the Balkans? There is a more interesting question here than the size of the round. The region produces exactly these engineers, in exactly these niches, for exactly this European regulation. The difference is that Rome has investors who know how to write a cheque for 270 million dollars. Is that a difference in talent - or a difference in what sits one floor above the talent?