European venture capital and private equity firm Smartfin on Tuesday announced a deal to acquire Hex-Rays, the Belgian company behind the widely deployed IDA Pro software disassembler.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not released but Smartfin said IDA Pro creator Ilfak Guilfanov joined a consortium of investors putting cash back into the restructured company.
Hex-Rays, based in Liège, Belgium, was founded in 2005 by Guilfanov with reverse engineering power tool IDA Pro as its flagship product.
IDA Pro is used by cybersecurity professionals to effectively translate a software’s binary code (consisting of ones and zeros) into a human readable text (an approximation of the software’s actual source code), to reveal and understand its original design, architecture, and logic.
[ READ: NSA Makes Reverse Engineering Tool Freely Available ]
The company said the main software use cases are IT security audits, internal stress testing, bug bounty programs, investigating new virus samples and validating security concerns.
Following the acquisition, Hex-Rays plans to expand operations and speed up automation and simplification of its software products.
“This partnership is an important milestone and opens new horizons for Hex-Rays,” Guilfanov said in a note announcing the acquisition.
“[This allows] Hex-Rays to further professionalize its organization and accelerate its product innovation efforts, as a means to jointly unlock the numerous international growth paths we have identified so far,” he added.
Related: NSA Makes Reverse Engineering Tool Freely Available
Related: IDA Developer Hex-Rays Falls Victim to Targeted Attack
Related: BlackBerry Releases Open Source Reverse Engineering Tool
Related: Google’s Binary Comparison Tool “BinDiff” Available for Free

Ryan Naraine is Editor-at-Large at SecurityWeek and host of the popular Security Conversations podcast series. He is a security community engagement expert who has built programs at major global brands, including Intel Corp., Bishop Fox and GReAT. Ryan is a founding-director of the Security Tinkerers non-profit, an advisor to early-stage entrepreneurs, and a regular speaker at security conferences around the world.
More from Ryan Naraine
- OpenAI Unveils Million-Dollar Cybersecurity Grant Program
- Galvanick Banks $10 Million for Industrial XDR Technology
- Microsoft Catches Chinese .Gov Hackers Targeting US Critical Infrastructure
- Researchers Spot APTs Targeting Small Business MSPs
- Mikrotik Belatedly Patches RouterOS Flaw Exploited at Pwn2Own
- Red Hat Pushes New Tools to Secure Software Supply Chain
- Investors Make $6M Bet on Manifest for SBOM Management Technology
- Entro Raises $6M to Tackle Secrets Sprawl
Latest News
- Insider Q&A: Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity In Military Tech
- In Other News: Government Use of Spyware, New Industrial Security Tools, Japan Router Hack
- OpenAI Unveils Million-Dollar Cybersecurity Grant Program
- Galvanick Banks $10 Million for Industrial XDR Technology
- Information of 2.5M People Stolen in Ransomware Attack at Massachusetts Health Insurer
- US, South Korea Detail North Korea’s Social Engineering Techniques
- High-Severity Vulnerabilities Patched in Splunk Enterprise
- Idaho Hospitals Working to Resume Full Operations After Cyberattack
