Two Milan start-ups announced cybersecurity funding on Tuesday 3 November, giving a small but telling view of where Italian venture money is going as the country's attack numbers rise.

CyberKord, founded in Milan this year by Alessandro Maggio, Dragos Tanasa and Cosimo Michelagnoli, has closed a €2.7m pre-seed round led by 360 Capital, with Plus Partners, Addendum Capital and Vento taking part, according to La Stampa and Forbes Italia. On the same day StartupItalia reported that Promethence, a 2025 spin-off set up by professors and researchers at the Politecnico di Milano, had raised €200,000 from Quantum Italia, a quantum-technology vehicle formed by Scientifica and the French investor Quantonation.

Closing the gap between alert and fix

CyberKord is going after what it calls the gap between how fast threats are spotted and how long they take to resolve. Detection can take minutes, Forbes Italia writes, but fixing the problem "still takes days because everything has to pass through a person's hands" (translated). The company builds a digital twin of a customer's IT infrastructure and uses AI to pick up an alert, investigate it and propose or carry out a fix.

The money will go on product development, technical and sales hires, and "the first pilot projects with large European companies in manufacturing, tech, healthcare and telecommunications" (translated), the company said in a statement quoted by La Stampa. In other words, the platform is not yet running with enterprise customers. Letting software act on its own inside production systems is also exactly what many security chiefs hesitate to allow, and CyberKord has published no accuracy or error figures.

Preparing for the quantum threat

Promethence works further down the stack. It designs hardware and software that speed up post-quantum cryptographic operations, meaning encryption meant to withstand future quantum computers, and that can be fitted into existing infrastructure, according to StartupItalia and AI4Business. It lists data centres, power grids, industrial plants and defence systems as target markets. A €200,000 cheque is a lab-to-market grant in all but name. Even so, it matters because EU governments are pushing operators of critical infrastructure to start moving to post-quantum standards over the next decade.

Why it matters

The backdrop is a sharper threat picture. Forbes Italia, citing the latest report from Clusit, the Italian information security association, says 507 serious cyberattacks on Italian targets were recorded in 2025, up 42% on the year before. Italy's venture market is still a fraction of France's or Germany's, so seed-stage security firms there often struggle to raise money at home before looking abroad.

The winners on Tuesday were early-stage specialist funds: 360 Capital, a Paris- and Milan-based firm, and Quantum Italia. The open question for both start-ups is whether Italian and European corporate buyers, who are traditionally slow to buy from young local vendors, will turn pilots into contracts. CyberKord's first test will be whether it can name a large customer by the time it raises again.

Original reporting: La Stampa, Forbes Italia, StartupItalia. Quotes from Italian sources are our translation.

Sources

• La Stampa, "CyberKord, la startup che automatizza la cybersecurity con l'Ai, raccoglie 2,7 milioni di euro", 3 Nov 2026: https://www.lastampa.it/economia/2026/11/03/news/cyberkord_startup_sicurezza_ai_raccolta_milioni-15786482/
• Forbes Italia, 3 Nov 2026: https://forbes.it/2026/11/03/cyberkord-27-milioni-automatizzare-cybersicurezza-ia/
• Tech.eu, 3 Nov 2026: https://tech.eu/2026/11/03/cyberkord-raises-eur27m-to-automate-it-and-cybersecurity-operations-with-ai/
• StartupItalia, 3 Nov 2026: https://startupitalia.eu/startup/promethence-round-da-200mila-euro/
• AI4Business: https://www.ai4business.it/quantum-computing/quantum-italia-investe-200mila-euro-in-promethence/

Image: AI-generated abstract illustration.