Hex-Rays buys bootstrapped six-person AI startup Ventris for up to $35M

What's the deal? Hex-RaysDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the Belgian maker of the reverse-engineering tool IDA Pro, is acquiring Israeli startup Ventris in a deal valued at $30 million to $35 million, Ctech reported on 18 October. Ventris was founded in 2025 by 25-year-old Elon Gliksberg, never raised outside capital and has six employees, all of whom will join Hex-Rays. Hex-Rays plans to expand its development team in Israel.

What does Ventris do? It builds what it calls an operating system for AI agents doing security research. Researchers build, run and measure agent workflows that analyse source code and binaries for known vulnerabilities (CVEs), zero-days, malware and backdoors, and then validate what the agents find. The platform is not tied to one model, can run in air-gapped environments, and the company says customers get strong results with open models rather than the most advanced systems from OpenAI or Anthropic. Gliksberg and CTO Amit Schendel both served in Israel's Unit 8200; Ventris says it works with government and commercial customers in Israel and abroad.

Why it matters for Hex-Rays: IDA Pro is one of the most widely used tools for taking compiled software apart, and the company has 35 years of reverse-engineering history. Agent workflows that hunt for bugs at scale are the obvious next layer on top, and the deal gives Hex-Rays a ready-made team instead of building it in-house. Hex-Rays itself has been owned by Belgian investor Smartfin since 2022.

The bigger picture: This is the second one-year-old, six-person Israeli AI startup to sell in a week. On 13 October, Rocket Software bought mainframe-agent startup Geniez AI in a deal reported at up to $100 million, a year after its $6 million seed round. Ventris did it without any funding at all, putting the price at roughly $5 million or more per employee. Buyers are paying up for small teams that have already made AI agents work on a hard, specialised problem, and AI-assisted security research in particular is becoming one of the busiest corners of the agent market.

Read more: Ctech · Geektime · Ctech on Rocket Software and Geniez AI