Beelzebub raises €3M to arm enterprises with AI-powered hacker-trapping technology
Beelzebub announces a €3M seed exclusively led by the Italian deep tech VC United Ventures. The capital will 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.
AI has made human-only cybersecurity teams obsolete. Using AI, attackers can detect vulnerabilities automatically, write custom malware, and run hundreds of simultaneous attacks. Smaller and smaller groups of hackers can now wreak maximum havoc at machine speed, meaning company security teams can no longer effectively defend entire organisations. The effects have been felt everywhere. In 2025 alone, cybercrime cost US organisations approximately $70 billion, driven primarily by ransomware and cryptojacking. In Europe, new mandates such as the NIS2 directive and the Cyber Resilience Act require critical infrastructure operators to meet relevant AI defence standards, compelling companies to update their security measures or face steep fines.
Rather than only defend the perimeter, Beelzebub’s platform operates under the premise of assumed breach. 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.
Mario Candela, CEO and Founder, Beelzebub, says, “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, 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.”
Beelzebub’s three-pronged platform is built as a SaaS or on premise 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, 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.
Following the catch-and-kill operation, Caronte, the platform’s AI analyst, reverse-engineers malware and produces a full incident report in a fraction of the time of a human analyst, closing the lag that makes most breaches so expensive. 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.
Following a €300K pre-seed from strategic investors and advisors, this seed round brings Beelzebub’s total funding to €3.3M. Beyond team and expansion, Beelzebub has already begun building new technology to protect AI agents directly.
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