Beelzebub, the company behind the GPLv3-licensed open source deception and honeypot framework of the same name, raised a EUR 3 million seed round led exclusively by Italian deep tech investor United Ventures, bringing total funding to about EUR 3.3 million after an earlier EUR 300,000 pre-seed. The Milan-based company said the capital will fund research hiring and international sales expansion, including offices in Rome and San Francisco by the end of the year, targeting essential-infrastructure operators regulated under the EU’s NIS2 directive. The platform follows an assumed-breach approach, pairing an Arcangelo red-team layer that simulates AI-driven attacks with LLM-based decoys that imitate servers, databases, APIs, cloud infrastructure and operational technology devices so attackers already inside a network are drawn into an isolated environment and analyzed. Beelzebub began in 2021 as an open source research project by security researcher Mario Candela, with more than 60 independent researchers feeding live threat intelligence, and was incorporated as a company in July 2025.
Beelzebub raises EUR 3M for its open source deception platform
Beelzebub, the company behind the GPLv3-licensed open source deception and honeypot framework of the same name, raised a EUR 3 million seed round led exclusively by Italian deep tech investor United Ventures, bringing total funding to about EUR 3.3 million after an earlier EUR 300,000 pre-seed. The Milan-based company said the capital will fund research hiring and international sales expansion, including offices in Rome and San Francisco by the end of the year, targeting essential-infrastructure operators regulated under the EU's NIS2 directive. The platform follows an assumed-breach approach, pairing an Arcangelo red-team layer that simulates AI-driven attacks with LLM-based decoys that imitate servers, databases, APIs, cloud infrastructure and operational technology devices so attackers already inside a network are drawn into an isolated environment and analyzed. Beelzebub began in 2021 as an open source research project by security researcher Mario Candela, with more than 60 independent researchers feeding live threat intelligence, and was incorporated as a company in July 2025.
Source: Beinsure