€3m · Seed · Cybersecurity · Milan, Italy
Milan-based Beelzebub has raised a €3m seed round led by United Ventures. The investor says the capital will support research hiring, new commercial offices in Rome and San Francisco, and customer acquisition across Europe, with a focus on organisations covered by NIS2.
The financing takes total funding to €3.3m after an earlier €300,000 pre-seed from strategic investors and advisers, according to United Ventures.
From attack paths to verified signals
Beelzebub starts from an “assumed breach” premise: instead of treating the perimeter as the only line of defence, it prepares for an attacker already moving inside a network. Its platform joins three functions. Arcangelo maps exposure and tests which paths are exploitable; the Beelzebub platform places realistic decoys and canary credentials where intruders may move; and Caronte analyses captured files, URLs, domains and other indicators to produce threat intelligence and response-ready reports.
That combination is designed to close the handoffs between offensive testing, detection and incident analysis. A conventional scanner can identify potential weaknesses, but a decoy has no legitimate user: interaction with one can therefore become a high-confidence signal for a security team. Beelzebub says its deception layer works across cloud, Kubernetes, networks, APIs and AI-agent surfaces, while Caronte can extract indicators and map attacker behaviour in minutes.
Open-source roots, enterprise test
The company grew from an open-source research project started by founder Mario Candela in Milan in 2021 and was incorporated in 2025, according to United Ventures. Its website shows more than 2,000 GitHub stars for the open-source runtime and cites independent research use by Akamai, the Cloud Security Alliance and the SANS Internet Storm Center. The investor says more than 60 independent researchers contribute live threat intelligence to the platform.
The commercial proposition is not simply another alerting tool. By connecting validation, deception and analysis, Beelzebub is trying to give small security teams a continuous loop that produces evidence they can investigate and act on. SaaS delivery can make the system easier to adopt, while an on-premises option may suit organisations that cannot send sensitive security data to a cloud service, a deployment choice also described in SecurityWeek’s reporting.
The execution test is whether Beelzebub can turn open-source credibility and technically striking research into repeatable enterprise deployments. Security buyers will expect clear controls over automated testing, dependable integrations and proof that high-confidence alerts improve response rather than adding another workflow. The seed round gives the company resources to build that research and commercial capacity while keeping its engineering centre in Milan.
Explore this theme
CodeWall raises $4m to automate adversarial testing — EUVC, funding brief · 13 October 2026. A closer look at continuous attack-path validation and the controls enterprise buyers need around automated offensive testing.
