Verona-based Equixly raises €10 million to scale its AI-driven platform for automated API security testing

Equixly, the Verona-based cybersecurity startup using agentic AI to automate API security testing, has raised €10 million in Series A funding to expand its team, advance its proprietary AI models and accelerate its international presence, beginning with the launch of a UK sales and marketing function next year.

The round was led by 33N Ventures, with participation from Alpha Intelligence Capital and existing investors JME Ventures, 360 Capital and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze. The company plans

Founded in 2022 by brothers Mattia and Alessio Dalla Piazza, who previously held roles at IBM, UniCredit and Accenture, Equixly focuses on the growing vulnerability landscape created by API-driven systems. APIs now account for more than half of global web traffic, and the average enterprise operates between 500 and 2,500 of them. This has made APIs a primary target for attackers, with 44% of malicious bots already focused on API endpoints and attacks projected to increase more than fivefold by 2030. In 2025 alone, global businesses faced an estimated $200 billion in losses due to API attacks.

Many organisations rely on manual penetration testing, which offers depth but cannot scale, or on automated scanners, which are fast but often fail to detect complex vulnerabilities such as business logic flaws. Equixly positions its platform as a way to overcome this gap by providing security and scalability simultaneously.

Equixly’s technology identifies up to 80% more vulnerabilities than standard Dynamic Application Security Testing tools and maps an organisation’s entire API environment. This allows the system to reveal 10% to 20% of so-called shadow endpoints that large enterprises often overlook. False positives are kept below 1%, enabling engineering teams to focus on real issues rather than unnecessary investigations.

The company achieves this through proprietary AI agents that automate penetration testing across the full development lifecycle. Once integrated into a customer’s systems and CI/CD pipelines, these agents study context, reconstruct software logic and conduct targeted attack simulations designed to mirror the behaviour of skilled human hackers. This enables Equixly to flag issues in real time and to detect deeply embedded vulnerabilities, emerging threats and business logic weaknesses that traditional scanners routinely miss. The company has been early in identifying new areas of risk, including those associated with Model Context Protocol servers, and expects this need to grow as AI-generated code increases the number and complexity of potential attack surfaces.

Mattia Dalla Piazza, CEO and co-founder of Equixly, said: “Enterprises can no longer rely on static or occasional testing to secure their systems that serve millions of customers and increasingly drive global markets. With new regulations pending and with API growth soaring, demand for autonomous security is only going to become more important. Equixly is making advanced security testing continuous, autonomous, and accessible to every development and security team. With agentic AI infrastructure and models fully built in-house, teams get the human-level reasoning they need, at the scale modern software demands, while ensuring maximum control over data and preserving privacy.”

Gonçalo Borges from 33N Ventures said: “Equixly is building the security layer for modern software, where development is transformed by AI, and infrastructure is defined by APIs. Its solution augments application security teams by providing a scalable, contextual and real-time solution, while uncovering vulnerabilities that traditional vendors often miss. This team is set to lead the charge among Europe’s cybersecurity innovators and become a global category leader in the next generation of application security.”

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