Aikido Security, the Belgian cybersecurity unicorn, has acquired Israeli startup Root for an estimated $70–100mn. Root's platform uses swarms of AI agents to research, write, test, and ship patches for open-source vulnerabilities in 15–40 minutes, targeting the exact version a company already runs to avoid risky upgrades or migrations. In over 80% of cases, no code changes are needed. Aikido is integrating Root's technology as a feature called Aikido Libraries — one customer cleared over 1,000 vulnerabilities in two weeks. Notably, Aikido also committed to backporting fixes for critical, actively exploited open-source vulnerabilities to the wider community rather than keeping them behind a paywall. Root was formerly known as Slim.AI, the company behind the Slim Toolkit container tool, and had raised $37.6mn before the acquisition.
