Exein raised $270m for runtime security inside embedded devices

Exein said on September 15 that it had raised $270 million in new funding at a $1.7 billion valuation, and that the round closed significantly oversubscribed. The company said the money funds expansion in the United States and the Asia-Pacific region as it builds what it called the security layer for robots, drones, vehicles and other machines that use artificial intelligence to act in the physical world.

Headline led the round, with participation from Sofina, Goldman Sachs, the EIB Group through the European Tech Champions Initiative, KfW Capital and T.Capital. Existing investors Balderton, HV, Intrepid Growth Partners, 33N Ventures, Lakestar, Supernova Invest, Blue Cloud Ventures and Geodesic Capital also took part.

The company builds security that runs on the device itself rather than in a monitoring layer above it. It said it sees around 5,000 new, non-repetitive attacks a week across a network of two billion devices, five times the previous year’s volume, and pointed to attackers using artificial intelligence to scale attacks against devices that make real-world decisions, including moving cars. A compromised machine, the company said, does not leak data but takes an action in the real world.

Exein named Photon, a preemptive runtime architecture launched earlier in 2026 that runs at kernel level to stop malicious execution before it happens, as one of its answers.

The company also said it is training a foundation model on two years of machine telemetry drawn from that device footprint, intended to power autonomous security agents. It expects the agentic security architecture to ship by the end of 2026, with first foundation models in the first quarter of 2027.

Founder and chief executive Gianni Cuozzo said frontier models are pushing the patch window to zero. Exein is privately held, and the figures are company-supplied and unaudited. The announcement named no automotive customer.