Belgian reverse engineering company Hex-Rays has acquired Israeli startup HexAI, formerly known as Ventris, in a deal valued at US$30 million to US$35 million. Founded in 2025 by 25-year-old Elon Gliksberg, the company developed an operating system for AI agents designed to conduct security research. All six employees will join Hex-Rays as part of the acquisition, and the buyer plans to expand the startup's operations in Israel.
Origins and Bootstrapped Growth
Gliksberg began exploring cybersecurity in middle school by writing cheats for video games, and in high school he built applications used by classmates. He later served in multiple roles in Israel's Unit 8200 and worked as the first employee at a startup to gain experience before launching his own company. Amit Schendel, who served with Gliksberg in Unit 8200, later joined as chief technology officer, and the six-person startup remained in stealth while developing its platform without outside capital.
AI Research Platform Capabilities
The HexAI platform allows security researchers to build and run research workflows using AI agents, measure their performance, and validate their findings. It analyzes source code and binary files to identify known vulnerabilities with CVE identifiers, zero-day vulnerabilities, malware, and backdoors. The system supports large-scale research, efficient AI token usage, and operation in air-gapped environments, and it is not tied to any specific AI model.
Customer Adoption and Efficiency
HexAI serves government and commercial customers in Israel and internationally, and its platform includes prebuilt workflows that research teams continuously develop and test against benchmarks and common targets. Customers have reported improvements in both the quality and quantity of security findings, alongside substantial reductions in AI model costs. According to the company, these gains can be achieved using open models, without relying on the most advanced systems from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Autonomous Workflow Improvement
Beyond manual refinement, HexAI includes workflows designed to improve other research workflows autonomously. This approach addresses the need for continuous optimization in security research, where targets and vulnerabilities change frequently. The company says these built-in capabilities allow security teams to benefit from ongoing research improvements without allocating additional engineering resources.
Founder Vision
Gliksberg said generic agents operating on their own are expensive, unreliable, and often produce inaccurate results. The platform enables researchers to focus on what they want to investigate, measure performance, and validate outputs. Users can build custom workflows, define how agents work, test and improve results, and run built-in workflows that the research team continuously refines without building everything themselves.
Hex-Rays Strategic Expansion
Hex-Rays has 35 years of experience in reverse engineering, and its flagship product, IDA Pro, enables researchers to analyze software even when source code is unavailable. The acquisition is intended to expand the company into AI-powered security research and address a broader range of cybersecurity challenges. Hex-Rays plans to invest in expanding the Israeli operation, integrate its experts into platform development, and build new research tools based on its reverse-engineering expertise, which are currently available exclusively through HexAI.
The acquisition highlights increasing demand for specialized AI tools in security research and validates HexAI's bootstrapped approach in a market often dominated by heavily funded AI startups. Less than a year after its founding, the startup has transitioned from stealth to an international exit with a six-person team. With Hex-Rays' resources and domain expertise, the combined organization is positioned to advance reliable and efficient AI-driven vulnerability discovery for government and commercial customers.