Exein has raised $270 million in new funding at a $1.7 billion valuation as the cybersecurity company expands its platform for protecting robots, drones, autonomous vehicles and other intelligent machines operating in the physical world. The significantly oversubscribed round was led by Headline, with participation from Sofina, Goldman Sachs, the European Investment Bank Group through ETCI, KfW Capital and T.Capital.
Existing investors Balderton, HV, Intrepid Growth Partners, 33N Ventures, Lakestar, Supernova Invest, Blue Cloud Ventures and Geodesic Capital also participated.
The financing was accompanied by an expansion of Exein’s existing revolving credit facility led by J.P. Morgan, with KfW joining as an additional lender.
Exein said its valuation has increased approximately 30-fold during the past two years, reflecting rapid international and commercial expansion.
The company also reported that annual recurring revenue during the first half of 2026 increased fourfold year-over-year.
Exein plans to use the funding to accelerate growth in the United States and Asia-Pacific while expanding its technology for what it describes as Physical AI security.
Physical AI refers to artificial intelligence embedded in machines capable of perceiving their surroundings, making decisions and taking actions in the physical world.
Examples include industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, drones, connected medical equipment and other intelligent infrastructure.
Exein believes these systems are creating a new cybersecurity challenge because attacks can increasingly affect machines that interact directly with physical environments rather than remaining confined to conventional software applications.
The company’s technology is already distributed across more than two billion connected devices spanning industrial automation, automotive, energy, healthcare, semiconductors, aerospace and robotics.
Exein has built its platform around embedded and runtime cybersecurity, allowing security technology to operate close to where software is actually executing.
Earlier in 2026, the company introduced Photon, a preemptive runtime security architecture that operates at the kernel level.
Photon is designed to identify and block malicious execution before an attack can run.
That architecture is particularly relevant to autonomous systems, where cybersecurity responses may need to occur immediately rather than waiting for a human analyst to identify and investigate an attack.
As autonomous machines become increasingly capable of operating independently, Exein believes cybersecurity systems will need to function at a similar machine-speed level.
The company is now combining its runtime security capabilities with the large volume of machine telemetry generated across its installed base.
Exein has spent approximately two years developing a proprietary foundation model specifically for Physical AI cybersecurity.
The model is being trained using machine telemetry generated through Exein technology deployed across more than two billion devices.
Unlike general-purpose AI models that are primarily trained on human-generated text, images and other content, Exein’s model is being trained on information showing how machines actually behave during real-world operations.
The company believes that dataset creates an important competitive advantage because it has been accumulated through years of activity across an enormous population of connected machines.
Exein plans to use the foundation model to power autonomous security agents capable of understanding the systems in which they operate, identifying potentially malicious behavior and taking protective action without waiting for human intervention.
The company expects to introduce its new agentic security architecture by the end of 2026.
Its first proprietary foundation models are expected to become available during the first quarter of 2027.
The strategy comes as artificial intelligence is also increasing the speed and sophistication of cyberattacks.
Exein said it is currently identifying approximately 5,000 new, non-repetitive attacks across its network every week.
That figure is approximately five times higher than the level recorded a year earlier.
The increase reinforces the company’s view that traditional cybersecurity processes built around identifying a vulnerability and subsequently developing and deploying a patch may become increasingly inadequate for autonomous systems.
Exein describes the emerging environment as one in which the traditional patch window is approaching zero because attacks can potentially develop and execute at machine speed.
Its long-term objective is to create security infrastructure capable of responding at the same speed.
The $270 million financing will also support substantial international expansion.
Exein already generates approximately 50% of its revenue from Asia-Pacific and maintains operations across Europe, Asia-Pacific and the United States.
Over the next two years, the company plans to increase hiring, customer relationships and partnerships in the United States.
Exein is also targeting the opening of a new office in the San Francisco Bay Area as it increases its presence in one of the world’s largest technology and AI markets.
The company expects Asia-Pacific to remain another major area of investment.
Since its previous financing round in December 2025, Exein has established an APAC headquarters in Taiwan and signed additional partnerships spanning semiconductors, industrial computing and connected infrastructure.
Taiwan is particularly relevant to the company’s strategy because of its central position within the global semiconductor and electronics manufacturing ecosystem.
Exein plans to continue building relationships across hardware manufacturers and technology providers that could integrate security directly into devices and computing infrastructure.
The company will also continue evaluating mergers and acquisitions that could expand both its technology platform and geographic footprint.
Exein’s growing installed base gives the company exposure to an increasingly broad collection of connected systems.
That scale could become particularly important as robotics and autonomous technologies expand into factories, transportation, healthcare, energy infrastructure and other sectors.
Rather than protecting only traditional IT environments, Exein is positioning itself as a cybersecurity layer embedded within the machines themselves.
The approach could become increasingly relevant as AI transitions from cloud-based software into systems capable of interacting with the physical world.
In that environment, cybersecurity failures could potentially have consequences beyond compromised information or disrupted applications because autonomous systems may control physical processes, vehicles or equipment.
Exein is betting that those risks will create demand for a specialized security architecture capable of understanding machine behavior and responding automatically.
The $1.7 billion valuation reflects investor expectations that Physical AI cybersecurity could become a significant category as intelligent machines proliferate.
Headline, which led the financing, manages more than $5 billion and invests globally across multiple stages of technology companies.
The participation of Goldman Sachs, European institutional investors and existing venture investors also gives Exein a broad capital base as it pursues global expansion.
For Exein, the new financing represents an opportunity to move beyond embedded cybersecurity toward an AI-native security platform capable of protecting increasingly autonomous machines.
Its combination of more than two billion connected devices, rapidly growing recurring revenue and a proprietary machine telemetry dataset gives the company a foundation for developing security models specifically designed around machine behavior.
As AI increasingly moves into robots, vehicles and industrial infrastructure, Exein aims to establish its technology as the security layer protecting those systems from attacks that can occur and evolve at machine speed.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI is moving out of the cloud and into the physical world, and this is the transition Exein was built for. We’ve developed deep expertise in how machines operate, invested heavily in the technology needed to protect them and built a global footprint that gives us an understanding of machines at a scale few others can match. Frontier models are pushing the patch window to zero. Attacks now happen at machine speed, so defense has to as well. Physical AI is the natural next step for Exein: we’re building machine-time security for machine-time attacks.”
Gianni Cuozzo, Founder and CEO of Exein
“As AI moves into robots, vehicles, and critical infrastructure, securing the physical world will become one of the defining cybersecurity challenges of the next decade. Exein’s deep expertise in embedded systems and unique machine data give it a powerful advantage as it scales globally, and that advantage traces back to the team. Gianni and his team have incredible technical and commercial depth, they put customer trust above all else, and they have always chosen the harder, long-term-oriented path. We’re honoured to help them build a global leader in Physical AI security.”
Clarey Zhu, Partner at Headline
