Beelzebub announced a €3 million seed round exclusively led by Italian deep tech VC United Ventures. The capital will fund the expansion of Beelzebub’s research team, the opening of new commercial offices in Rome and San Francisco by the end of the year, and client acquisition across Europe, with particular emphasis on organizations regulated under the EU’s NIS2 directive.
Beelzebub operates under an assumed-breach premise, working from the assumption that an attacker is already inside a network rather than defending only the perimeter. The moment an embedded attacker moves, Beelzebub detects and ensnares it in a closed loop of attack simulation, deception, and automated threat analysis. The platform is offered as SaaS or on-premise for the most sensitive environments, including LLM inference on Beelzebub-supplied hardware, and is described as NIS2-ready by design. More than 60 independent researchers around the world feed live threat intelligence into the platform as new attack methods emerge.
The platform’s purple team structure combines Arcangelo, which covers the red team side by simulating targeted attacks, with Beelzebub Managed, which covers the blue team side by planting LLM-powered traps throughout a company’s infrastructure that resemble real servers, databases, APIs, and cloud systems. The moment an attacker touches one of these traps, Beelzebub detects and blocks the attack before it can cause damage, isolating the affected machine and triggering response actions; the traps update in real time to mimic new CVEs, which the company says forces dormant attackers within a network to reveal themselves. Because Arcangelo and Beelzebub Managed operate as a single automated offense-defense loop, the company says there are no handoffs between tools or vendors. Following a catch-and-kill operation, Caronte, the platform’s AI analyst, reverse-engineers malware and produces a full incident report in a fraction of the time a human analyst would take, and can also run entirely on-premise for enterprises and government organizations that cannot risk exposing sensitive data to cloud-based malware analysis tools.
Beelzebub said its platform was the first to identify and document TeamPCP, the threat actor previously linked to the breach at GitHub. The company cited data showing cybercrime cost U.S. organizations approximately $70 billion in 2025 alone, driven primarily by ransomware and cryptojacking, while new European mandates including NIS2 and the Cyber Resilience Act require critical infrastructure operators to meet AI defense standards or face fines. Following a €300,000 pre-seed round from strategic investors and advisors, the new seed round brings Beelzebub’s total funding to €3.3 million. Beyond team expansion, the company said it has already begun building new technology to protect AI agents directly.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. This seed round will supercharge our efforts to bring modern cybersecurity to the companies who cannot afford to compromise.”
Mario Candela, CEO and Founder, Beelzebub
“The cybersecurity market is undergoing a structural reset: when offensive AI scales faster than any human team can respond, the only viable defense is one that operates at the same speed and intelligence. In Mario’s technical depth and the founding team’s execution we found a genuinely distinctive approach to that problem, and backing them this early reflects our conviction that the next chapter of cybersecurity will be written by companies of this kind.”
Massimiliano Magrini, Co-founder and Managing Partner, United Ventures
