Aikido Security Acquires Israeli Startup Root in Deal Worth Up to $100 Million

As part of the deal, Aikido will open a new development center in Israel and hire all of Root's employees. The company also plans to grow its team in the country. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but the deal is estimated to be worth between $70 million and $100 million.

The Root acquisition is one of several deals Aikido has completed over the past year. Earlier, the company also acquired AI code review startup Trag and autonomous penetration testing companies Allseek and Haicker.

Aikido now serves more than 100,000 teams worldwide, including customers such as the Premier League, Revolut, SoundCloud, and Niantic.

Earlier this year, Aikido raised $60 million in a Series B funding round at a $1 billion valuation, bringing its total funding to about $85 million.

“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."

Root was originally founded as Slim.AI, the company behind the open-source Slim Toolkit. It was started by Benji Kalman, Mickey Gordon, Ian Riopel, and John Amaral.

The company has around 25 employees, including about 15 people working at its development center in Tel Aviv. So far, Root has raised about $31 million from investors such as Insight Partners, Decibel Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Lema Partners, and TechAviv.

Root's customers include SiXworks (an IBM subsidiary), DeleteMe, and Relay Networks.