Beelzebub has secured seed funding to expand its AI-native cybersecurity platform, grow its research and commercial teams, and accelerate customer adoption across Europe while advancing technology designed to defend against AI-driven cyber threats.
Beelzebub, an Italy-based cybersecurity startup developing an AI-native platform to protect organisations from AI-driven cyberattacks, has raised a €3 million seed funding round led exclusively by United Ventures. The investment follows a €300,000 pre-seed round backed by strategic investors and advisors, bringing the company’s total funding to €3.3 million.
Founded by Mario Candela, Beelzebub is addressing the growing challenge posed by AI-powered cyberattacks, which enable attackers to automate vulnerability discovery, generate custom malware and launch large-scale attacks at machine speed.
As cyber threats become increasingly sophisticated and regulatory frameworks such as the NIS2 Directive and the Cyber Resilience Act raise security requirements across Europe, organisations are under pressure to strengthen their cyber defences.
Rather than relying solely on perimeter protection, Beelzebub operates on an assumed-breach model, detecting malicious activity from attackers already inside a network. Its platform combines attack simulation, deception technology and automated threat analysis to identify, isolate and respond to threats before they can cause damage.
The platform consists of three integrated components. Arcangelo simulates targeted attacks to continuously test an organisation’s defences, while Beelzebub Managed deploys AI-powered decoy infrastructure that attracts and detects attackers inside a network. Once a threat is identified, Caronte, the platform’s AI malware analyst, automatically reverse-engineers malicious software and generates incident reports, either in the cloud or fully on-premises for organisations with strict data security requirements.
The platform is available as both a SaaS solution and an on-premises deployment and is designed to meet NIS2 compliance requirements.
Mario Candela, CEO and founder of Beelzebub, said that the rise of AI-powered attackers has fundamentally changed cybersecurity, requiring organisations to complement human expertise with AI-based systems capable of responding at machine speed:
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.
Beelzebub will use the new funding to expand its research team, open commercial offices in Rome and San Francisco by the end of the year, accelerate customer acquisition across Europe with a particular focus on organisations subject to NIS2 requirements, and continue developing new technologies designed to protect AI agents directly.