APIs have quietly become the backbone of the digital world, driving everything from payments and banking to healthcare and retail. But as more systems depend on them, they’ve also become one of the easiest ways in. In 2025 alone, security breaches targeting APIs cost global businesses an estimated $200 billion, exposing sensitive data and disrupting services across industries.
Equixly, a Florence-based cybersecurity company founded in 2022, uses “agentic” AI technology to simulate human hackers, probing corporate APIs for hidden vulnerabilities long before real intruders can find them. These autonomous agents continuously perform complex penetration tests, identifying deep logic flaws and emerging weaknesses.
The company has just closed a €10 million Series A round, led by 33N Ventures with support from Alpha Intelligence Capital, JME Ventures, 360 Capital, and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze.
The new funding will help Equixly expand its research team, advance its proprietary AI models, and open a UK Sales and Marketing hub in early 2026 to meet rising international demand.
Making security continuous, intelligent, and built-in
Equixly was founded by Mattia and Alessio Dalla Piazza, two brothers who saw firsthand how companies still relied on fragmented, reactive tools to defend increasingly complex digital systems. That frustration inspired the brothers to design a system that could think like a hacker, replicate the reasoning behind real attacks, and continuously test without supervision.
Mattia Dalla Piazza, CEO and co-founder of Equixly, shares with TFN: “Our motivation is a combination of deep personal experience and a clearly recognised market need. Each of us has almost 20 years of experience in tech and cybersecurity — we actually started working on security together back in high school. In 2008, my thesis was already focused on web application security, and that passion has stayed with us ever since.”
He adds, “Then, while running our cybersecurity firm in 2022, we saw a strong pattern: most of our clients were asking specifically for API security testing. Existing solutions couldn’t help them test at scale and still ship secure applications quickly. Equixly was born exactly to fill that gap — turning our long-standing expertise into a scalable product that solves a problem we were repeatedly seeing in the market.”
Equixly stands out with its swarm of autonomous AI agents that scan, map, and attack simulations across an organisation’s entire API landscape, reconstructing workflows and logic flows to identify weaknesses that conventional scanning software misses.
Mattia elaborates, “Under the hood, we combine different AI models that understand API behaviour, data flows and business logic, and we run them on our own infrastructure so customer data stays private and under control. This allows Equixly to detect complex, logic-based vulnerabilities that most API security and DAST tools miss, and to do it continuously, integrated into the software development lifecycle.”
Unlike tools from competitors such as Salt Security, Noname Security, or 42Crunch, Equixly doesn’t rely on simple pattern matching. Its agents reason through each test, learning the software’s context as they go.
Equixly detects as many as 80% more vulnerabilities than standard Dynamic Application Security Testing tools, while keeping false positives below 1%. The system can also uncover shadow APIs, bringing them under protection before attackers find them.
What’s next?
The new funding will help scale its AI research team, strengthen integrations with enterprise DevSecOps pipelines, and prepare for broader global rollout.
Mattia concludes, “We want to turn Equixly into the leading AI-first platform for application security and expand it globally. We’ll use the Series A to grow our international sales and marketing presence, strengthen customer success and solutions engineering, and deepen our footprint in the domestic enterprise market. In parallel, we’ll keep investing heavily in product, AI/ML and security research so Equixly evolves from an API security solution into a broader, developer-first DevSecOps and future Agentic AI DAST platform.”
TFN contacted Equixly for comment regarding diversity and inclusion; no response was received at the time of publication.
