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Rome-based Exein secured €70M in a Balderton-led Series C to expand its firmware-embedded cybersecurity platform to billions of connected devices worldwide.
Key Takeaways
- Exein raised €70M in a Series C closed July 2025, led by Balderton Capital, with Lakestar and Supernova Invest joining.
- The company protects connected devices by running security software inside firmware - independent of network-level defenses.
- Exein reported approximately 450% year-over-year revenue growth and coverage of over one billion devices at the time of the raise.
Rome's Cybersecurity Challenger Lands Institutional Capital
Italian startup Exein closed a €70M Series C on July 15, 2025, in a round led by Balderton Capital and joined by new investors Lakestar and Supernova Invest, with follow-on participation from existing backers 33N Ventures, United Ventures, and Partech. The raise brings Exein's total funding to a significant sum for a seven-year-old company operating out of Rome, placing it among the better-capitalized IoT security specialists in Europe.
The company says it now secures more than one billion connected devices. Revenue grew roughly fivefold year-over-year in the period leading up to the close.
What Does Exein Actually Do?
Exein builds security that runs inside a device's firmware, not around it. Traditional network-based defenses assume there is a perimeter to protect. Exein's approach treats every device as its own security boundary - meaning a compromised router, industrial sensor, or medical instrument can identify and respond to attacks without depending on anything external.
That distinction matters because the attack surface for connected hardware has expanded faster than the tools designed to defend it. Supply chains for embedded devices span dozens of chipmakers, integrators, and software vendors. Vulnerabilities enter at any of those layers. Exein's runtime monitoring layer is designed to sit at the firmware level and catch anomalies as they execute - not after the fact, and not at the network edge.
The company has struck partnerships with semiconductor and hardware manufacturers including Kontron and MediaTek, which distributes its technology across a wide installed base of devices at the chip level.
Why Did Investors Move Now?
The timing reflects both regulatory pressure and market demand. The EU Cyber Resilience Act, which entered into force in late 2024, imposes mandatory cybersecurity requirements on connected products sold across Europe. Manufacturers now face binding obligations to ship devices with security built in - not bolted on afterward. Exein's firmware-first model is precisely what that compliance demand points toward.
Beyond Europe, critical infrastructure operators in the US and Asia are operating under increasing scrutiny following a series of disclosed attacks on industrial control systems and connected manufacturing equipment. Exein has named the US, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea as expansion targets for the capital from this round.
How Does This Round Fit Into Exein's Broader Trajectory?
The Series C was not Exein's final move in 2025. In December of that year, the company raised an additional €100M in a mix of equity and debt, led by Blue Cloud Ventures with support from HV Capital, Intrepid Growth Partners, Geodesic Capital, and J.P. Morgan, valuing the company at approximately €700M. That valuation nearly doubled what it had been five months earlier at the Series C close, reflecting commercial momentum that extended well past the July raise.
By September 2026, Exein had raised $270M at a $1.7B valuation in a round led by Headline with participation from Sofina, Goldman Sachs, EIB Group, and KfW Capital, formally entering unicorn territory and drawing comparisons to the most prominent defensive cybersecurity firms in Europe. The July 2025 Series C, in hindsight, was the round that put institutional credibility behind a thesis the company then executed rapidly.
What the Market Reflects
Embedded security is not new as a concept. What has changed is scale. The number of connected devices in industrial and consumer settings has expanded to the point where network-perimeter defenses produce diminishing returns. Investing in firmware-native security became more straightforward to justify once the regulatory floor was established.
Exein is not alone in this space - several firms in the US and Asia work on device-level protection - but the combination of European regulatory alignment, geographic positioning for the EU market, and a demonstrated deployment footprint across over a billion devices gave investors a concrete case to back.
Outlook
Exein used the Series C proceeds to extend its commercial footprint into Asia-Pacific and North America, deepen chipmaker integrations, and build toward the larger raises that followed. The July 2025 round looks, in context, like the inflection point at which the company transitioned from a defensible niche player to a credible platform business. Its path to unicorn status took less than fifteen months from that close - fast by any measure for a European deep-tech company.
