Cellebrite completes $170M Corellium purchase, announces layoffs amid restructuring
The company expands its cyber capabilities while adjusting headcount in Israel, laying off 20 employees.
Cellebrite has completed its acquisition of the U.S.-based company Corellium for $170 million, of which $150 million was paid at closing and an additional $20 million was converted into shares. Corellium shareholders may receive up to $30 million more over the next two years, contingent on meeting agreed-upon milestones. The deal was first announced in June.
In parallel with the acquisition, Cellebrite is laying off about 20 employees in Israel out of approximately 550. The company employs around 1,300 people worldwide.
Cellebrite said in response: “Each year, as part of our forward-looking approach, we conduct a comprehensive review of our business plans and technology roadmap, and make organizational adjustments to align roles and capabilities with current business needs. We make every effort to identify internal opportunities and re-integrate employees where possible.”
Corellium develops a virtualization platform for Arm-based operating systems, including iOS and Android, enabling an exact virtual copy of the operating system to run for security testing, attack analysis, and advanced simulations. The platform is considered highly valuable in the forensic research community because it allows investigators to examine OS and application behavior without requiring a physical device, significantly accelerating investigation and vulnerability detection processes.
For Cellebrite, this acquisition is a strategic step that expands the company’s forensic capabilities and pushes it deeper into the offensive-defensive cyber domain. Cellebrite currently relies heavily on physical devices and bypassing access barriers, while virtualization makes it possible to recover locked devices, analyze data, and conduct tests via virtual models without risking evidence contamination.
One of the first products the combined company plans to introduce is Mirror, a tool that will create a “mirror device,” a virtual replica of the target device containing all its data. The tool will allow users to search, analyze, and present findings more clearly than traditional forensic interfaces, which often rely on static screenshots and older, less dynamic methods.
With the completion of the acquisition, Chris Wade, Corellium’s co-founder and CTO, joins Cellebrite as CTO. Wade is a prominent figure in the cybersecurity world; in 2023 he reached a plea agreement with Apple after a lengthy legal dispute over Corellium’s virtualization technology. He was also pardoned in 2020 by U.S. President Donald Trump in connection with an unrelated early-2000s case.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) approved the closing of the deal after the parties signed a national-security agreement with relevant U.S. authorities.
