Milan-based Beelzebub raises €3 million to combat AI-driven cyberattacks with AI-powered hacker traps
Italian cybersecurity startup Beelzebub, which uses an AI-native platform to defend against digital threats, has secured €3 million in seed funding to expand its research team, open new offices, and enhance its deception-based technology.
Beelzebub, a Milan-based AI-native cybersecurity startup, announced today the closure of a €3 million seed funding round led exclusively by Italian deep-tech VC United Ventures. The company intends to use the capital to expand its research team, open new commercial offices in Rome and San Francisco by the end of the year, and acquire clients across Europe with a focus on NIS2-regulated organizations. Additionally, Beelzebub has already begun developing new technology to directly protect AI agents.
This round follows a €300,000 pre-seed from strategic investors and advisors, bringing the company’s total funding to €3.3 million. CEO and founder Mario Candela emphasized that cybersecurity is a nonstop battle that humans can no longer fight alone, as AI-powered attackers are too powerful, competent, fast, and numerous. The only viable defence is to counter at the same pace and intensity.
Beelzebub’s platform operates on the assumption of breach rather than perimeter defence. It creates traps that mimic real infrastructure—such as servers, databases, APIs, and cloud systems—to deceive attackers. When an attacker triggers a trap, the system detects and blocks the attack before damage occurs. The platform comprises three components: Arcangelo (red team) simulates targeted attacks; Beelzebub Managed (blue team) deploys LLM-powered traps; and Caronte, an AI analyst, reverse-engineers malware and produces a full incident report in a fraction of the time a human analyst would need. Caronte can run entirely on-premise, crucial for enterprises and government organizations that cannot risk sending sensitive data to cloud-based analysis tools.
The platform is fed live threat intelligence from over 60 independent researchers worldwide and is NIS2-ready by design. In 2025, Beelzebub intercepted a live attack by TeamPCP, one of the most dangerous hacking teams linked to breaches at GitHub, Microsoft, and other major organizations.
Massimiliano Magrini, co-founder and Managing Partner at United Ventures, stated that 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. He noted that in Mario’s technical depth and the founding team’s execution, they found a genuinely distinctive approach, and backing them early reflects their conviction that the next chapter of cybersecurity will be written by such companies.
