Exein raises $270M at $1.7B valuation to fund Physical AI
Exein raised $270 million at a $1.7 billion valuation in an oversubscribed round to build a foundation model for Physical AI security and expand into the U.S.
Italy-based Exein announced $270 million in an oversubscribed funding round that values the IoT cybersecurity company at $1.7 billion and brings total capital raised to more than $600 million. The company was founded in 2018 and develops embedded and runtime security for connected devices and machines.
Headline led the round. Other participants include Sofina, Goldman Sachs, the European Investment Bank Group, KfW Capital, Balderton, Lakestar and additional venture firms.
Exein’s software combines continuous threat monitoring, detection and containment with a kernel-level, preemptive runtime security layer designed to block attacks before they execute. The company inserts lightweight agents on devices and uses kernel-level controls to manage vulnerabilities, active attacks and compliance across device fleets.
The new funding will be used to train a proprietary foundation model on telemetry from real machines and to deploy an agentic security architecture intended to enable autonomous agents to respond to threats at machine speed. Exein also plans to accelerate expansion in North America and other international markets.
According to Gianni Cuozzo, founder and CEO, “AI is moving out of the cloud and into the physical world, and this is the transition Exein was built for.” He added that “frontier models are pushing the patch window to zero. Attacks now happen at machine speed, so defense has to as well. Physical AI is the natural next step for Exein: we’re building machine-time security for machine-time attacks.”
Exein has focused on endpoints that often run legacy software and are difficult to patch quickly. The company emphasizes runtime prevention and containment rather than relying solely on periodic patching, a model it says fits environments where updates are slow and attacks can spread rapidly.
The firm will continue serving industrial and enterprise customers that manage large numbers of connected devices while using the new capital to support product development and geographic growth.
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