Beelzebub Raises €3M for LLM-Powered Hacker Traps

Milan-based cybersecurity startup Beelzebub said it raised €3 million (about $3.4 million) in a seed round led by United Ventures, bringing total financing to $3.8 million. The company plans to use the funds to expand its research team, hire staff, open offices in Rome and San Francisco, and increase customer acquisition across Europe, with a focus on organizations subject to the EU’s NIS2 rules.

Founded in 2025, Beelzebub has developed an AI-native platform that assumes attackers may already be present on a network. The platform runs continuous adversary emulations to map potential attack paths before they are exploited and deploys runtime deception, including traps powered by large language models, to detect and contain intrusions in real time. When an attack is detected, the system can isolate affected systems and trigger incident response procedures.

The platform converts intercepted attacks into defensive intelligence. An AI analyst component examines detected malware and produces full incident reports for security teams. The product can be delivered as a cloud service or deployed fully on-premises for environments that cannot forward data to external clouds. Beelzebub says the platform receives live threat intelligence feeds from more than 60 independent researchers and is designed to meet NIS2 requirements.

Mario Candela, founder and CEO, commented: “Cybersecurity is a nonstop battle, and one that humans can no longer fight alone. AI-powered attackers are too powerful, too competent, too fast, and too numerous, meaning the only way to fight back is at the same pace and intensity. Beelzebub’s product adapts to new types of malware and is always updated to match the current state of the most sophisticated attacks.”

The company describes its approach as a combination of continuous simulation, active deception and autonomous threat analysis. Beelzebub intends to use the new capital primarily to grow research capabilities, open the planned offices and expand its customer base among European organizations subject to NIS2 cybersecurity rules.