Cyber unicorn Aikido acquires Israeli startup Root for $70-$100 million

The Belgian company expands its AI security push and will open a new development center in Israel following the deal.

Belgian cybersecurity unicorn Aikido Security is acquiring Israeli cybersecurity company Root, which developed an AI platform for securing open-source components. Following the acquisition, Aikido will open a development center in Israel that will absorb all of Root’s employees and is expected to further expand its local workforce. The value of the acquisition was not disclosed, but is estimated at between $70 million and $100 million.

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The acquisition is the latest in a series of deals made by Aikido over the past year, following its purchases of AI-based code review company Trag and autonomous penetration testing companies Allseek and Haicker. The company serves more than 100,000 teams worldwide, including clients such as the Premier League, Revolut, SoundCloud, and Niantic. Earlier this year, Aikido completed a Series B funding round of $60 million at a valuation of $1 billion, bringing its total funding to approximately $85 million.

Root began as Slim.AI, the developer of the open-source Slim Toolkit. The company was founded by Benji Kalman, Mickey Gordon, Ian Riopel, and John Amaral. It employs about 25 people, of whom approximately 15 are based in its Tel Aviv development center, and has raised about $31 million to date from venture capital funds including Insight Partners, Decibel Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Lema Partners, and TechAviv. Its clients include SiXworks (a subsidiary of IBM), DeleteMe, and Relay Networks.

“Open source needs patching, and it needs it fast. Today you have two options, and neither works for most companies: upgrade and likely break your application, or migrate to a vendor's locked-down replacement,” said Willem Delbare, co-founder and CEO of Aikido Security. “With Root, we fix what teams are actually running, generating hundreds of verified patches a day: no upgrades, no migrations, no breaking changes. That's how supply chain security gets solved for everyone, not just the 1%.”

"As software developers ourselves, we've seen firsthand how engineering teams are overwhelmed by endless lists of reported vulnerabilities and forced to decide which ones deserve attention first. We believe the industry is focused on the wrong problem. Instead of debating which vulnerabilities should be fixed, we should simply fix them in the versions organizations are already running," said Mickey Gordon and Benji Kalman, co-founders of Root.

"Most solutions on the market force organizations to choose between complex version upgrades and migrating to proprietary platforms. Those migrations can take months and often break working applications. Our goal has always been to let organizations continue using the technologies they already rely on while delivering security fixes quickly and without requiring code changes."