Roman cybersecurity company Exein nets €6 Million in new funding

Rome-based IoT cybersecurity firm Exein has raised €6 Million in a Series A funding round. Operating on an open-source model, Exein specialises in and provides cybersecurity solutions for IoT devices at the firmware level. The new funding is expected to propel the company’s product expansion, with a particular focus on Industrial, Automotive, and Medial IoT devices, and the expected recruitment drive that will accompany this expansion.

According to a Garnter report from 2019, “... by 2022, 70% of organizations that don’t have a firmware upgrade in place will be breached due to a firmware vulnerability.” With this in mind, Exein provides a set of open-source tools for both system protection and remote monitoring that enable embedded systems to recognize and ward off unauthorised outside influencers. This comes in contrast to existing mechanisms which rely on external security measures.

Taking security to its root level, Exein is particularly suited to help protect the 30.9 billion IoT devices that are expected to be deployed by 2025. To put this type of service in the context of the human body, it’s perhaps easiest to think of Exein’s offer as a built-in immunity system for IoT devices.

Exein was founded in 2018 by Gianni Cuozzo and today, sees its technology active in over 600,000 IoT devices, a number that the company is aiming to significantly increase, both via this round of funding, and beyond.

The closing of the Series A round was co-led by manufacturing-focused fund Future Industry Ventures and deep-tech-focused eCAPITAL Entrepreneurial Partners, with existing Italian digital technologies investor United Ventures following on.

“While traditional approaches to securing embedded and IoT devices aim to reduce programming errors in the firmware, Exein’s solution detects malicious behavior during the operation of the devices,” comments eCAPITAL’s Dirk Seewald. “With this new approach, Exein has seen tremendous growth recently and attracts enormous interest in the developer community.”