Europe has a new unicorn: Italian startup Exein has just raised a $270 million funding round led by Headline at a $1.7 billion valuation on the promise of providing a cybersecurity layer for physical AI ' an evolution of its initial focus on IoT. 'The concept of Exein is that every device should be able to defend itself, regardless if they are connected to a secure network or not,' CEO Gianni Cuozzo told TechCrunch. The Rome-based company has been doubling down on this approach; its latest product, Photon, is a runtime security solution to prevent attacks at the kernel level of a device. This approach requires working in close partnership with manufacturers, and Exein says it has been doing so since its inception in 2018. According to Cuozzo, the choice to work directly with OEMs and silicon vendors was driven by the conviction that connected devices were on the rise. This created significant tailwinds for Exein, which claims to have secured more than 2 billion connected devices in...
learn more
