Beelzebub, a Milan-based AI-native cybersecurity platform that protects digital assets from AI-driven cyber attacks, today announced a €3 million Seed funding round exclusively led by the Italian DeepTech VC United Ventures. The company plans to use this capital to fund the expansion of the research team, the opening of new
Rahul Raj 
Beelzebub, a Milan-based AI-native cybersecurity platform that protects digital assets from AI-driven cyber attacks, today announced a €3 million Seed funding round exclusively led by the Italian DeepTech VC United Ventures.
The company plans to use this capital to fund the expansion of the research team, the opening of new commercial offices in Rome and San Francisco by the end of the year, and client acquisition across Europe, with a particular emphasis on NIS2-regulated organisations. Beyond team and expansion, Beelzebub has already begun building new technology to protect AI agents directly.
This round follows a €300k pre-Seed from strategic investors and advisers and brings the company’s total funding to €3.3 million.
Mario Candela, CEO and founder of Beelzebub, said, “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.”
Beelzebub began as Mario Candela’s research project in Milan in 2021 and was incorporated in July 2025. The AI-native platform is strategically designed to fool attackers by creating traps resembling real infrastructure.
It says it is built on the premise of assumed breach, rather than acting as a perimeter defence. According to the company, the smartest assumption is not that an attacker will force entry at some indeterminate point in the future, but that one is already inside a network and waiting for the perfect moment to strike. The moment an embedded attacker makes a move, Beelzebub detects and ensnares it in a closed loop of attack simulation, deception, and automated threat analysis.
Beelzebub states that its three-pronged platform is built as a SaaS or on-premises solution for the most delicate environments, including LLM inference on Beelzebub-supplied hardware. More than 60 independent researchers from around the world feed live threat intelligence into the platform as the latest attack methods emerge. The platform is NIS2-ready by design.
In its purple team structure, the company product Arcangelo covers the red team (attack) by simulating targeted attacks, and Beelzebub Managed covers the blue team (defence) by planting LLM-powered traps throughout a company’s infrastructure that resemble real infrastructure (e.g. servers, databases, APIs, cloud systems).
The moment an attacker touches one of these traps, Beelzebub detects and blocks the attack before it can inflict damage, isolating the affected machine and initiating the response actions. Traps update in real time to mimic new CVE (Common Vulnerability and Exposures), which forces dormant attackers within the network to reveal themselves. Since Arcangelo and Beelzebub Managed form one automated offence-defence loop, there are no handoffs between tools or vendors, says the startup.
After the catch-and-kill operation, Caronte, the platform’s AI analyst, reverse-engineers malware and delivers a full incident report in a fraction of the time a human analyst would need. Caronte can also run entirely on-premise, essential for enterprises and government organisations that cannot risk providing sensitive data to cloud-based malware analysis tools.
Massimiliano Magrini, co-founder and Managing Partner at United Ventures, says, “The cybersecurity market is undergoing a structural reset: when offensive AI scales faster than any human team can respond, the only viable defence 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.”
In 2025, Beelzebub highlighted that it intercepted a live attack by one of the world’s most dangerous hacking teams, TeamPCP, who had been linked to breaches at GitHub, Microsoft, and other major organisations.
