Milan Startup Beelzebub Raises $3.4 Million to Build AI Traps for Hackers

Key points

• Beelzebub, founded in Milan in 2025, closed a €3 million (roughly $3.4 million) seed funding round led by venture capital firm United Ventures.
• Total funding raised by the company now stands at $3.8 million.
• The platform uses AI-powered decoy systems to detect intruders who've already broken into a network and contain them without human intervention.
• Beelzebub plans to open offices in Rome and San Francisco and grow its European client base.
• The company's CEO says human defenders alone can no longer keep pace with AI-assisted criminal attacks.

A Milan-based startup called Beelzebub has secured €3 million (about $3.4 million) in seed funding to expand a cybersecurity platform built around a simple, unsettling idea: the hackers are probably already inside.

United Ventures, an Italian venture capital firm, led the round. Combined with earlier investment, Beelzebub has now raised $3.8 million since it was founded earlier this year.

What does the platform actually do?

Beelzebub's software starts from the assumption that a criminal has already broken into a company's network and is quietly waiting for the best moment to strike. Rather than simply keeping attackers out, the platform spreads digital traps across the network to catch them when they move.

Those traps run on large language models (LLMs), the same class of AI that underlies tools like ChatGPT. When an intruder touches a fake file, a dummy login page, or a convincing but hollow database, the platform flags it, isolates the affected segment, and begins gathering intelligence on the attack. An AI analyst then reads any malicious software it catches and produces a full incident report.

It's roughly the logic our 21 July story on "context bombs" documented: plant the right decoy and the attacker's own curiosity becomes the trap.

The system also runs continuous tests against its own network, simulating attacker moves to expose weak points before a real criminal finds them. For organisations in banking or critical infrastructure that can't send sensitive data to outside servers, the platform runs entirely on the company's own hardware.

Who is Beelzebub targeting as customers?

The company is primarily chasing organisations covered by NIS2, the European Union's updated Network and Information Security directive, a set of legal rules that force certain companies and public bodies across Europe to meet minimum cybersecurity standards or face fines. The platform is designed to satisfy several of those requirements out of the box.

Live threat intelligence feeds into the system from more than 60 independent security researchers worldwide.

"Cybersecurity is a nonstop battle, and one that humans can no longer fight alone," said founder and CEO Mario Candela, speaking to SecurityWeek. "AI-powered attackers are too powerful, too fast, and too numerous, meaning the only way to fight back is at the same pace and intensity."

The fresh capital will fund a larger research team, new offices in Rome and San Francisco, and a push to sign up clients across Europe.

Beelzebub's raise was first reported by SecurityWeek. It's the third AI-security startup funding story we've covered this month, following Beacon Security's $13 million round on 17 July and 8Layers' $2.9 million raise on 9 July. The pattern is consistent: investors are backing platforms that assume perimeter defences have already failed.