Exein raises €6M to fuel the company’s planned architectural product expansion
Exein announced it has completed a €6 million Series A funding round. The investment is co-led by Future Industry Ventures (FIV), a fund initiated by Redstone and SBI Group dedicated to future industrial systems, and eCAPITAL Entrepreneurial Partners, a German independent VC firm focusing on early-stage DeepTech investments. The round also saw participation from existing investor United Ventures, an Italian venture capital firm specializing in digital technology investments.
As the number of embedded, connected devices – think routers, phones, cars, home automation, and industrial devices – steadily increases, so does the vulnerability to security loopholes and cyberattacks. According to Gartner, by 2022, 70% of organizations that don’t have a firmware upgrade in place will be breached due to firmware weaknesses. In this context, Exein has developed an open-source set of tools for self-protection and remote monitoring that help embedded systems detect and ward off undesirable behavior.
This is a new approach that is especially suited to the 30.9 billion IoT devices expected to be in operation by 2025: rather than relying on external measures, Exein instead focuses on intrinsic, embedded security that acts as an immune system emanating from the device itself. Exein’s easy-to-integrate solution offers a seamless implementation experience for developers in charge of firmware, thus greatly broadening access to security.
The latest round of funding is expected to fuel the company’s planned architectural product expansion that will broaden Exein’s use cases to other markets such as Industrial IoT, Automotive and Medical IoT. Furthermore, the fresh funds will be used to enable the accompanying tech hirings to meet the growing traction.
Founder Gianni Cuozzo, who started Exein in 2018, states: “IoT and embedded vulnerabilities are on the rise. We believe that in order to truly secure IoT and embedded systems, developers must be empowered with the right tools for effective security by design. We are on a mission to build the world’s first ecosystem for security, and we are delighted to onboard our new investor FIV, a fund with whom we share the belief in the key role of data protection and cybersecurity in industry 4.0 as well as eCAPITAL, an experienced DeepTech investor from Germany with an extensive international network and expertise in cyber security investments.”
“Exein has an outstanding team and we are impressed by their elegant solution of securing virtually any IoT device,” comments Philipp von Hagen, Managing Partner of Future Industry Ventures. “There have already been some impressive use cases across a variety of industries, proving the wide applicability of Exein’s approach. That in turn speaks to the company’s massive potential in paving the way for universal IoT security. Security is indispensable, and this is exactly the kind of innovation that we believe will make edge industrial systems safer, more reliable and hence deployment of edge IoT more pervasive.”
“While traditional approaches to securing embedded and IoT devices aim to reduce programming errors in the firmware, Exein’s solution detects malicious behavior during the operation of the devices,” comments Dirk Seewald, Partner at eCAPITAL. “With this new approach, Exein has seen tremendous growth recently and attracts enormous interest in the developer community. Exein fits perfectly into our portfolio of cybersecurity startups supported by eCAPITAL’s dedicated cybersecurity fund.”