Beelzebub, a Milan-based AI-native cybersecurity platform built to defend digital assets against AI-driven cyber attacks, has closed a €3m Seed round led exclusively by Italian DeepTech investor United Ventures.
According to EU Startups, the fresh capital will go towards growing the firm’s research team, opening commercial offices in Rome and San Francisco before the end of the year, and winning new clients across Europe, with a specific focus on organisations covered by the NIS2 directive.
The startup has also started developing new technology aimed at protecting AI agents themselves.
The Seed round comes on the heels of a €300k pre-Seed backed by strategic investors and advisers, taking Beelzebub’s total funding to €3.3m.
Beelzebub started life in 2021 as a research project by founder Mario Candela in Milan before being incorporated in July 2025. Rather than building a perimeter defence, the platform works on an assumed breach principle, treating the most sensible starting point as the idea that an intruder is already inside the network, biding their time.
Its approach centres on deception, planting decoys that look like genuine infrastructure to lure hidden attackers. When one of them acts, the platform catches them in a closed loop combining attack simulation, deception, and automated threat analysis.
The company offers its three-pronged platform as SaaS or on-premises for highly sensitive environments, including LLM inference running on hardware Beelzebub supplies. A network of more than 60 independent researchers around the globe streams live threat intelligence into the system as fresh attack techniques appear, and the platform is NIS2-ready by design.
Within its purple team model, the Arcangelo product handles the offensive red team role by running simulated targeted attacks, while Beelzebub Managed takes the defensive blue team side, seeding LLM-powered decoys across an organisation’s estate that imitate real assets such as servers, databases, APIs, and cloud systems.
Should an intruder interact with a decoy, the system detects and halts the attack before harm is done, isolating the compromised machine and triggering response actions. Decoys refresh in real time to reflect newly published CVEs (Common Vulnerability and Exposures), pressuring dormant intruders into exposing themselves. Because Arcangelo and Beelzebub Managed operate as a single automated offence-defence loop, the startup says no handoffs between tools or vendors are required.
Once a threat has been caught and neutralised, Caronte, the platform’s AI analyst, reverse-engineers the malware and produces a complete incident report far faster than a human analyst could. Caronte can also operate fully on-premise, a vital feature for enterprises and government bodies unable to send sensitive data to cloud-based malware analysis services.
Beelzebub CEO and founder Mario Candela 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.”
United Ventures co-founder and managing partner Massimiliano Magrini said, “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.”
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