Grayshift

Grayshift, founded in Atlanta in 2016 by David Miles, Braden Thomas, Justin Fisher, and Sean Larsson, operates in the mobile device digital forensics market. The founding team leveraged its extensive background in cybersecurity research and exploitation to address a critical need for law enforcement agencies: gaining lawful access to evidence on locked and encrypted mobile devices. Co-founder David Miles previously co-founded Endgame, a cybersecurity firm acquired by Elastic, and held roles at Optiv and IBM Internet Security Systems. Braden Thomas, another co-founder, brought experience from his time as an engineer and researcher at Apple and Optiv.

The company's business is centered on providing technology to public safety and government investigative agencies, with a strict policy of not selling to the private sector or to countries where there is a risk of human rights violations. Grayshift's primary revenue stream comes from the sale of its flagship product, GrayKey. In 2023, Grayshift merged with Magnet Forensics, a Canadian digital investigation software company, after both were acquired by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo. This merger aims to create an end-to-end digital investigations platform by combining Grayshift's mobile access and extraction with Magnet's analysis suite.

Grayshift's core offering is the GrayKey, a hardware and software tool that provides forensic access to locked mobile devices, including iOS and Android platforms. The technology is designed to extract encrypted or otherwise inaccessible data, such as call logs, messages, photos, location data, and even some deleted files, often in less than an hour. This capability gives law enforcement agencies same-day access to mobile evidence while maintaining the chain of custody, a significant departure from older, slower methods. The GrayKey device is a physical box that connects to mobile devices, controlled by a web interface, and is sold to law enforcement agencies for prices reportedly ranging from $15,000 to $30,000. The company has secured significant funding, including a $47 million Series A round in 2020 led by PeakEquity Partners and a subsequent strategic investment from Thoma Bravo in 2022.

Keywords: digital forensics, mobile device extraction, law enforcement technology, GrayKey, lawful access, cybersecurity research, evidence extraction, incident response, government agencies, data recovery