Six people. No outside capital. About a year old. A reported $30M to $35M.
That’s the deal Calcalist Tech reported Oct 18: Hex-Rays, the Belgian maker of IDA Pro, is acquiring Israeli startup HexAI, formerly Ventris. Founder and CEO Elon Gliksberg is 25 and a Unit 8200 alum. CTO Amit Schendel served alongside him. Neither company has published a price, so treat the range as reported, not confirmed. Hex-Rays plans to invest in growing the Israeli operation.
Do the per-head math. $30M to $35M across six people is $5M to $5.8M each. That’s acqui-hire-plus pricing. It isn’t paying for revenue, because nobody has disclosed any. It’s paying for a working system and the people who know how to tune it.
What the system is. HexAI calls it an operating system for AI agents doing security research. Researchers build workflows, run them against source code and binaries, then measure accuracy and validate what the agents found: known CVEs, zero-days, malware, backdoors. It ships prebuilt workflows tested against benchmarks, plus workflows that improve other workflows. It isn’t tied to one model, it runs air-gapped, and HexAI says customers got better findings and lower model bills, including on open models (per Calcalist).
Why the incumbent paid. IDA Pro is a reference disassembler across much of the industry. Hex-Rays’ revenue crossed €20M in 2020 after averaging 23% annual growth for a decade, at what lead investor Smartfin called extraordinary EBITDA margins (per Smartfin’s 2022 deal note). A tool that strong has one real risk: the analyst stops opening it. If agents do the first pass on a binary, whoever owns the agent workflow owns the user. Hex-Rays is buying the layer between the analyst and IDA before somebody builds it on top of IDA, or around it.
The harness is the product. This week made that case from both sides. NorForge’s look inside exposed Cairn panels showed criminals breaking into sites at 100-plus companies with a harness driving a cheap DeepSeek model, not a frontier lab’s best. HexAI’s pitch is the defender’s version of the same lesson: structure, measurement and validation beat raw model horsepower. The model is turning into an input. Workflow, ground truth and the ability to prove a finding is real are where the margin sits. In binary analysis, ground truth is the decompiler. Hex-Rays already owns that.
What we’d ask before calling it cheap. Cash, stock, earn-out, or a mix? With six people, retention terms matter more than the headline. How is it funded? Revenue that crossed €20M back in 2020 makes a $30M-plus check a real swing, not a tuck-in, so balance sheet, sponsor equity or debt all tell you something. And do HexAI workflows ship inside IDA licenses, or as a new SKU that has to win its own budget line?
For practitioners. If you run a vuln research or malware team on IDA, ask Hex-Rays three things. Do workflows run fully offline with your own models? How are findings validated before they reach an analyst? How will it be priced? Air-gapped, model-agnostic agents are what government and regulated labs need. Those teams can’t ship binaries to a hosted API.
Speculation, clearly labeled. Other tool incumbents face the same build-or-buy call. Burp Suite maker PortSwigger and Binary Ninja maker Vector 35 are the obvious names to watch. We have no reporting that either is shopping. But a $5M-a-head reference price for a small, proven agent team now exists, and every founder in this niche just saw it.
The read. In AI security research, the labs sell the engine. The money is in the harness that makes the engine accurate, cheap and auditable. Hex-Rays just paid up to say so.