Beelzebub, the AI-native cybersecurity platform that protects digital assets from cyber-attacks carried out by AI agents, has announced that it has closed a €3 million seed funding round led by the venture capital fund United Ventures. The capital will fund the expansion of the research team, the opening of new sales offices in Rome and San Francisco by the end of the year, and the acquisition of clients globally, with a particular focus on organisations considered critical to the countries’ ecosystems. Artificial intelligence has rendered cybersecurity teams composed solely of humans obsolete. Thanks to AI, attackers can automatically identify vulnerabilities, write bespoke malware and carry out hundreds of simultaneous attacks. Increasingly small groups of hackers are now capable of causing massive damage at machine speed, and corporate security teams are no longer able to effectively defend entire organisations. The effects have been felt everywhere. In 2025 alone, cybercrime cost US organisations around $70 billion, driven mainly by ransomware and cryptojacking. In Europe, new regulations such as the NIS2 Directive and the Cyber Resilience Act require operators of critical infrastructure to comply with appropriate AI security standards, obliging companies to update their security measures or face fines of 2 per cent of global turnover, up to 10 million euros. Beelzebub was founded in Milan in 2021 as an open-source research project initiated by Mario Candela, a computer engineer and security researcher, and was incorporated as a company in July 2025. The Milan-based laboratory and headquarters remains the hub for research into new malware and the development of new features, in a sector (post-AI cybersecurity) in which Italy is increasingly establishing itself as fertile ground for technological innovation. Beelzebub does not simply protect the outer perimeter like outdated firewalls: it operates according to the principles of zero trust and the ‘assumed breach’