Beelzebub, a Milan-based AI-native cybersecurity platform, has raised €3M in a seed round exclusively led by Italian deep tech venture capital firm United Ventures.
The round brings total funding to €3.3M following a €300K pre-seed from strategic investors and advisors. The capital will fund expansion of the research team, the opening of new commercial offices in Rome and San Francisco by the end of 2026, and client acquisition across Europe with a focus on NIS2-regulated organisations.
Addressing The Market Opportunity
AI has fundamentally altered the economics of cyber attacks. Attackers can now detect vulnerabilities automatically, write custom malware, and run hundreds of simultaneous attacks at machine speed. Smaller groups of hackers can cause maximum damage at a scale and pace that traditional human-led security teams cannot match. In 2025 alone, cybercrime cost US organisations approximately $70B, driven primarily by ransomware and cryptojacking.
In Europe, the NIS2 directive and the Cyber Resilience Act are compelling critical infrastructure operators to meet new AI defense standards or face significant financial penalties. For most enterprise security teams, the combination of accelerating offensive AI and tightening regulation has made the status quo unsustainable.
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How The Technology Works
Rather than focusing solely on perimeter defense, Beelzebub operates on the assumption that an attacker is already inside the network. Its platform plants LLM-powered traps throughout a company’s infrastructure that closely resemble real systems, including servers, databases, APIs, and cloud environments. The moment an attacker touches one of these traps, the platform detects and isolates the threat, blocking the attack before it can cause damage and triggering an automated response. Traps update in real time to mimic newly disclosed vulnerabilities, forcing dormant attackers within the network to reveal themselves.
The platform operates across three integrated components. Arcangelo covers the offensive side by simulating targeted attacks against the organization’s own infrastructure. Beelzebub Managed covers the defensive side through the deployment and management of LLM-powered traps. Caronte, the platform’s AI analyst, reverse-engineers captured malware and produces a full incident report in a fraction of the time a human analyst would require, closing the response lag that makes most breaches so costly. Caronte can run entirely on-premise for enterprises and government organizations that cannot expose sensitive data to cloud-based analysis tools.
More than 60 independent researchers from around the world feed live threat intelligence into the platform as new attack methods emerge. The system is available as SaaS or on-premise, including LLM inference on Beelzebub-supplied hardware for the most sensitive environments, and is NIS2-ready by design.
Growth And Market Traction
Beelzebub originated as a research project by founder Mario Candela in Milan in 2021 and was incorporated as a company in July 2025. In 2025, the platform intercepted a live attack by TeamPCP, a threat actor previously linked to breaches at GitHub, Microsoft, and other major organizations, making Beelzebub the first to identify and document the group. The company now serves enterprise clients globally and is backed by a community of over 60 independent security researchers contributing to its open-source intelligence layer.
Expansion Plans
The seed funding will support team growth across research and commercial functions, the opening of offices in Rome and San Francisco by the end of 2026, and accelerated client acquisition across European markets. Beelzebub has also begun developing new technology to protect AI agents directly, extending its platform into an emerging area of enterprise security risk.
Looking Ahead
Mario Candela, CEO and Founder of Beelzebub, described the core challenge the platform addresses: “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.”
Massimiliano Magrini, Co-founder and Managing Partner at United Ventures, explained the firm’s conviction behind the investment: “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.”
About Beelzebub
Beelzebub is a Milan-based AI-native cybersecurity platform founded by Mario Candela and incorporated in July 2025. The platform protects enterprise digital assets from AI-driven cyber attacks by operating on the principle of assumed breach, planting LLM-powered traps throughout company infrastructure to detect, isolate, and analyze threats in real time. Supported by more than 60 independent researchers worldwide and backed by live threat intelligence, Beelzebub serves enterprise clients globally and was the first platform to identify and document the threat actor TeamPCP.
