25-year-old Israeli founder sells stealth AI startup for up to $35 million without raising capital
Hex-Rays, the Belgian developer of reverse-engineering tool IDA Pro, is acquiring Ventris one year after its founding. The six-person startup, built by Elon Gliksberg without outside funding, develops an operating system for AI agents conducting security research.
Hex-Rays, the Belgian developer of the reverse-engineering tool IDA Pro, is acquiring Israeli startup Ventris in a deal valued at $30 million to $35 million. Founded in 2025 by 25-year-old Elon Gliksberg, Ventris has remained in stealth while developing an operating system for AI agents designed to conduct security research. The six-person company did not raise outside capital, and Hex-Rays plans to invest in expanding its operations in Israel.
Gliksberg began programming and exploring cybersecurity in middle school, when he wrote cheats for video games. In high school, he developed several applications used by classmates, including an Uber-style app that allowed students to coordinate rides after obtaining their driver's licenses. He later served in several roles in Israel's Unit 8200, where he led projects.
After completing his military service, Gliksberg joined a startup as its first employee to gain experience before launching his own company. He published technical articles and vulnerability research, identified critical security flaws in services operated by multibillion-dollar companies, and received compensation for reporting them.
As the use of AI agents expanded, Gliksberg identified an opportunity to apply them to security research. He founded Ventris to make the process measurable and its findings verifiable. Amit Schendel, who served alongside Gliksberg in Unit 8200, later joined the company as CTO.
Ventris serves government and commercial customers in Israel and internationally. The company says its customers have reported improvements in both the quality and quantity of security findings, alongside substantial reductions in AI model costs. Those gains can be achieved using open models, without relying on the most advanced systems from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
The 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, including those associated with Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) identifiers, as well as zero-day vulnerabilities, malware and backdoors.
Researchers can create customized workflows, assess their accuracy and refine them. Ventris also offers prebuilt workflows that its research teams continuously develop and test against benchmarks and common security research targets. The platform includes workflows designed to improve other research workflows autonomously.
“Instead of relying on generic agents operating on their own, which are expensive and unreliable, our users can focus on what they want to research, measure performance and validate findings,” Gliksberg said. “They can build research workflows around their needs, define how the agents work, and test and improve the results. They can also run built-in workflows that our research teams continuously test and improve, without having to build everything themselves.”
The system is designed for large-scale research and efficient AI token usage. It is not tied to a specific AI model and can operate in air-gapped environments, where systems are isolated from external networks. Such capabilities can be particularly relevant to organizations conducting sensitive security research that cannot be transferred to external services.
Hex-Rays is acquiring Ventris to expand into AI-powered security research and address a broader range of cybersecurity challenges. The Belgian company has 35 years of experience in reverse engineering, and its flagship product, IDA Pro, enables researchers to analyze software even when its source code is unavailable.
Following the acquisition, all six Ventris employees will join Hex-Rays. The company plans to expand Ventris's operations in Israel, bring Hex-Rays experts into the platform's development and build new research tools drawing on Hex-Rays' reverse-engineering expertise. Tools based on that expertise are currently available exclusively through Ventris, according to the company.
