ROME — Italian cybersecurity company Exein has raised $270 million at a $1.7 billion valuation as it develops security technology for robots, drones, autonomous vehicles and other connected machines.

Venture capital firm Headline led the financing. Participants included Sofina, Goldman Sachs, the European Investment Bank Group’s European Tech Champions Initiative, KfW Capital and T.Capital, alongside existing investors, according to the company’s statement.

The European Investment Bank confirmed it took part in the deal, describing the transaction as a completed investment. It reported the round as around €234 million and the valuation as around €1.45 billion, figures broadly consistent with Exein’s dollar-denominated announcement.

Exein integrates security software into device firmware, the low-level code which governs how hardware functions. Its technology is present in more than two billion devices, across markets including industrial automation, automotive systems, health care, aerospace and robotics.

The Rome-based company is developing a foundation model for physical AI security designed to run on or inside connected hardware and automatically monitor and block malicious behavior, founder and CEO Gianni Cuozzo told the Financial Times.

Exein plans to grow in the U.S. and Asia‑Pacific and to recruit in‑demand cybersecurity and computing specialists. Cuozzo said Exein employs about 100 people and plans to expand its staff to 200 within 18 months.

The company is also developing what it calls a foundation model for physical AI security. Unlike a general-purpose chatbot, the system will monitor and control device behavior embedded in connected hardware and issue automated responses to malicious behavior.

Exein says it is training the model with telemetry gathered from its existing technology. It aims to launch an agentic security architecture by the end of 2026 and release its first foundation models in the first quarter of 2027. Those products remain in development, and Exein has not published independent test results showing their effectiveness against attacks on robotic or autonomous systems.

Exein reported that its annual recurring revenue in the first half of 2026 reached four times the amount from the same period last year, but it did not disclose the underlying figures. Cuozzo told the Financial Times that annual revenue is in the tens of millions of dollars.