Beelzebub raises EUR €3 million to boost cybersecurity

Beelzebub has raised €3 million in a seed funding round led by United Ventures, bringing the Milan-founded cybersecurity startup's total funding to €3.3 million.

It will use the money to expand its research team, open commercial offices in Rome and San Francisco, and pursue customers across Europe, focusing on organisations covered by NIS2 rules.

United Ventures was the sole lead investor. Beelzebub had previously raised €300,000 in a pre-seed round from strategic investors and advisers.

The startup develops cybersecurity software that uses deception techniques to lure attackers into fake digital assets designed to resemble real servers, databases, application programming interfaces and cloud systems. The approach assumes an attacker may already be inside a network, rather than trying to break in from outside.

When an attacker interacts with one of these decoys, the system is designed to detect the activity, isolate the affected machine and begin response actions. Its software also updates the traps in real time to mirror newly disclosed vulnerabilities, with the aim of drawing out dormant attackers.

Threat focus

Beelzebub says it was the first to identify and document TeamPCP, a threat actor previously linked to the breach at GitHub. The finding emerged from its own research and threat monitoring.

Its platform includes three products: Arcangelo, which simulates attacks; Beelzebub Managed, which deploys defensive traps across infrastructure; and Caronte, which analyses malware and produces incident reports.

Caronte can run on-premise for enterprises and government bodies that do not want sensitive data sent to cloud-based malware analysis services. The broader platform is also available either as software as a service or as an on-premise deployment.

More than 60 independent researchers contribute threat intelligence to the platform. The company is also developing technology aimed at protecting AI agents directly.

Market pressure

The funding comes as cybersecurity companies respond to the use of artificial intelligence by both attackers and defenders. Businesses in Europe also face tighter regulatory scrutiny under measures including NIS2 and the Cyber Resilience Act, which impose new obligations on operators of critical infrastructure and other organisations.

Beelzebub argues that these pressures are making older security models less effective, particularly where human analysts must respond to large volumes of attacks. Its pitch centres on automating both detection and analysis inside an organisation's systems, rather than relying only on perimeter defences.

Mario Candela outlined the company's view of the threat landscape and how it plans to use the new funding.

"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," said Mario Candela, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Beelzebub.

For United Ventures, the investment reflects a view that cybersecurity tools must adapt to increasingly automated attacks.

"The cybersecurity market is undergoing a structural reset: when offensive AI scales faster than any human team can respond, the only viable defense 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," said Massimiliano Magrini, Co-founder and Managing Partner at United Ventures.

Founded as a research project in Milan in 2021, the business was incorporated in 2025 and now says it serves enterprise customers internationally.