Scaling Europe
00:00:00 · Sebastian Johnson, Gianni Cuozzo
[00:00:00] S0: Hello, welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. Today we have a first time. Gianni, where are you right now? [00:00:07] S1: Hi, hi Seb. I'm at New York Stock Exchange right now. Pretty exciting day for us here, and thanks thanks so much for having us here. [00:00:17] S0: It looks amazing. I mean, I can see your logo plastered all behind you. You are looking sharp. Tell me, what is going on? What are you announcing today?
00:00:26 · Gianni Cuozzo
[00:00:26] S1: Well, mean, first of all, it's just one day that I'm looking sharp. Normally, I I don't look like this. I am very easygoing guy. You know, today we are announcing our new rounds. So we are raising 270,000,000, and we became 1,700,000,000 evaluation. So it's a huge milestone for us. You know, all of this, we're building the next step of Exein. Exein has been growing particularly fast in the last year, and this round comes as the next steps of our evolution and our expansion plan that we have, mostly on the Physical AI. As you know, we discussed that on the embedded side, we've been the largest runtime technology in the world right now, we are running on over 2,000,000,000 devices, and Physical AI was the next move in our phase, because with basically, if we look about connected systems, in the early eighties and nineties, we had SCAD and PLCs, then we starting to have embedded, then we started IoT, which is basically embedded with an internet connection. Now we're starting to have physical AI, which is basically devices that will host artificial intelligence and foundational model directly on those systems, and those system will be autonomously operating without the human intervention. So now we have system that will manage themselves and will be operating themselves, and therefore it was a natural evolution for us because we served the entire supply chain and the industry also to move in the physical space.
00:01:56 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:01:56] S0: For those who don't know, maybe explain a bit more about why you are so well positioned to expand into physical AI. What kind of devices have you been working on? Why are you so well positioned to take advantage of this huge transition that we're seeing to physical AI?
00:02:11 · Gianni Cuozzo
[00:02:11] S1: Absolutely, so at Exein for five years, we've been working for with the entire supply chain of embedded connected systems, so we started with the instruction set manufacturers, such as ARM and others, then we moved to silicon vendors and chipset vendors, such as, you know, we have a... The agreement with MediaTek and many others in that space. So basically, are embedded directly inside their BSP, which is the software layout of those chipset. And then we've been working with the old ODMs, top ODMs in the world, especially in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Europe, and US. And, typically, the ODMs are the one who actually builds those devices for third party OEMs. And turns out that that this supply chain is exactly the same supply chain that we found in physical AI because in physical AI, you have the silicon vendors that are building the the the, basically, the hardware, and then you have the ODMs that are basically combining the physical operation and the chipset and bringing the devices to the physical world. Exein runs with the concept and was born with the concept that that security should be on device. And now that intelligence and decision making is running on device, it's also important that security is running on the device. And because we were already positioning, because we serve the embedded market towards these five years, we've been also well positioned to grab in the physical IO space, and therefore we started already working. We have already customers in robotics, customer in the human android sector, drones, self driving cars. So it was the natural evolution of the company and we are continuing to serve in the embedded, but also expanding ourselves in the physical space.
00:03:55 · Sebastian Johnson, Gianni Cuozzo
[00:03:55] S0: And tell us how many devices are you working with or kind of embedded in to date? [00:04:00] S1: So today between our open source distribution and paid customers, we are about 2,000,000,000 devices, 2,000,000,000 devices worldwide, which is the largest runtime security module in any industry, which is make us very proud. Of course, open source was a big part of our distribution thesis, and also being part of the Yocto project, being part of Zephyr and many others as software standards that are particularly popular in the embedded space was a huge push for us. Then we started converting on this installed base, now we are moving on towards that. I mean, we run on devices that are very, very different between each other. We go from submarine to connected coffee machines, to gym equipment, to Satcom for satellite communication. We've been starting running also in satellites. So we are in, you know, we are pretty much in every single device that you can imagine for, and most probably, part of our code, maybe also the open source part is already running in your devices, even though you don't know it, but Exein is starting surrounding your life, which sounds scary, but it's, it was exactly the, the the the dream we had and the project we had when we started as an open source, and now we are building up the company around it.
00:05:25 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:05:25] S0: And the growth that you've experienced has been absolutely phenomenal. I think this is your third round in, you know, like a year and a half, two years, you've gone from, you know, think $250,000,000, maybe a couple of years ago to now $1,700,000,000 The most valuable cybersecurity startup in Europe. What has happened? You know, where has this growth come from in the last year and a half?