Smartfin led consortium acquires Hex-Rays to accelerate product innovation efforts
Hex-Rays has been acquired by a consortium of investors led by Smartfin, and including co-investors SFPIM and SRIW. Ilfak Guilfanov, the founder of Hex-Rays and architect of the technology platform, also reinvests a substantial amount in the new structure.
Founded in 2005, Hex-Rays developed a set of software reverse engineering tools for mainly IT security companies and government organizations. Hex-Rays’ flagship product IDA Pro allows IT security professionals to 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.
The main use cases are IT security audits, internal stress testing, bug bounty programs, investigating new virus samples and validating security concerns. Over the past 10 years, Hex-Rays’ revenues have grown on average with 23% per year, crossing the €20m mark in 2020, at extraordinary EBITDA margins.
With this transaction, Hex-Rays aims to expand and professionalise its organization in anticipation of its next growth phase, while also accelerating the further automation and simplification of its software solutions.
“Smartfin is excited to leverage its prior experience by actively contributing to the further growth and international expansion of Hex-Rays, together with Ilfak, SFPIM and SRIW.” said Bart Luyten, Founding Partner at Smartfin.
“Hex-Rays has built a unique market-leading technology in a highly successful manner and is well positioned to further build on that strong basis, in order to capture the ample growth opportunities that the core software reverse engineering and adjacent markets will undoubtedly offer over the next few years.”, Luyten continued.
“This partnership is an important milestone and opens new horizons for Hex-Rays.” added Ilfak Guilfanov, Founder of Hex-Rays.
“I look forward to this newly established alliance, which will allow Hex-Rays to further professionalise its organization and accelerate its product innovation efforts, as a means to jointly unlock the numerous international growth paths we have identified so far.”, Guilfanov continued.
“SRIW and SFPIM were happy to invest alongside Smartfin and Hex-Rays’ founder in expanding the organization of this world-class tech company” said Leon Cappaert, Investment Manager at SFPIM.
“This transaction is a fine illustration of a public/private partnership and will contribute to SRIW’s objective of strengthening the Walloon region’s technological ecosystem” added Nicolas Dhaene, Investment Manager at SRIW.