Scaling Europe
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?
00:05:46 · Gianni Cuozzo, Sebastian Johnson
[00:05:46] S1: I think we had, we were really well positioned for three mega trends that are happening right now in cybersecurity. One was regulation for connected system. For many years, cybersecurity for connected system was a customer facing problem. So basically the device manufacturer were selling you a device, and it was your responsibility to run this device properly in a secure environment. Then we starting to see regulation that actually shared the responsibility of cybersecurity between the user and the manufacturers, and we help manufacturers to achieve compliancy and to be green light on the certification side. So this was trend we had in Europe, we had CRA, but we have cybersecurity regulation happening in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, also Mainland China, US. So the entire connected system environment is getting heavily regulated, and we help with this regulation and our software helps also with being compliant with those regulation. The second trend was about the foundational models being able to hack systems. And the reason why we never seen so many attacks on physical systems, typical physical system attacks were very complex attacks to execute, mostly reserved to intelligence operator, military operator operations, [00:07:13] S0: and,
00:07:13 · Gianni Cuozzo
[00:07:13] S1: you know, elite hacker, let's call it this way, even though I do not... I don't like this labeling, but let's call it just that that way. With the rise of foundational model that actually are able to attack and execute full full full attack chain on those systems, the cost of those attack is going very down. So it's not going to zero yet, but the tend... The tendency is that those attack going to zero. And, of course, physical attacks are more dangerous than what's happening in, you know, if somebody stole the password of your database is, of course, a problem, but if somebody shut down the lighting system of an airport, it's a much bigger problem. So... And because we are sitting exactly on being the first line of defense between happened in the physical world and what happened in digital world, of course, was a huge push for us. And third is what's happening from a geopolitical geopolitical side. Unluckily, we are living in a very strange times, which I hope regardless of the push of our... For my company that, you know, the world would be a safer place, but what we are starting to see right now with what's happening in Ukraine, what's happening in The Middle East is that cybersecurity and cyber warfare, especially on physical system, it's a thing, and will be much more a thing in the future. So those three mega trends are... Is helping Exein grow very fast. We are growing 400% year on year since three years now, which of course is pushing both our valuation, but also our expansion plan very, very future, and this is why we are doing this round. We also, you know, this round was particularly oversubscribed, so we had to close the race at certain ticket because otherwise the investor keeping flowing in, so we were very happy about that. And, you know, it's also nice to see a European cybersecurity company reaching this global level of footprint, which is very important, I guess.
00:09:18 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:09:18] S0: And then let... You know, you talk about being oversubscribed. That's an amazing problem to have. Can you touch a bit on the investors that you chose to get on board with and why you chose them?