Italy's Exein raises another 100 million. Now acquisitions and IPO goal

After the 70 million raised in July, a new round for Exein, the company founded in Rome in 2018 and which has become an international reference with its integrated cybersecurity solutions on devices. This time the funding is €100 million. The round was led by Blue Cloud Ventures, with participation from HV Capital, Intrepid Growth Partners, Geodesic Capital and J.P. Morgan.

In recent months, the company has grown in North America and the Asia-Pacific region. And the opening of a new office in Taipei is planned for early next year. By 2025, the company says it has quintupled its revenues from the previous year, expanded its presence in critical infrastructure and industrial manufacturing, and established strategic partnerships with manufacturers and chipset providers such as Kontron and Mediatek.

Since the July round, the company's valuation has almost doubled: 'We are growing much faster than expected,' CEO and co-founder Gianni Cuozzo explains to Il Sole 24 Ore. 'The strategy of partnering with large vendors is working and has consolidated our technological leadership. Our model is different from that of traditional software: while standard contracts last two or three years, we work with long-term commitments - five, seven, ten years. This new funding round further strengthens the trust of our partners and the solidity of our positioning. It is a great satisfaction because we built everything starting from Rome, with a strong focus on Italian research and development, which then became international'.

The next steps include, thanks to new capital, the launch of 'a strategy of acquisitions, in Europe and especially outside Europe. Today, we are already the leading global player in embedded runtime security; the next evolution is to complete our offer on edge security, i.e. proximity security: local servers, local LLM, IoT devices, systems that do not go through the cloud. In fact, we see a remigration from the cloud to local infrastructures. Between 2015 and 2021 everything went towards the cloud; today we see a reverse movement, driven by data sovereignty and cost control requirements'.

In the medium to long term, the goal 'is an IPO: it will depend on the evolution of the markets, but in our planning the horizon is 2030-2031. In any case, we already run the company with this perspective. Should an acquisition come sooner, we are ready for that scenario as well'.