*These Israelis have been silently inside iPhones for years.
(…)
In 2014, US private equity fund Francisco Partners acquired a majority stake in NSO for around $120 million. Just over a year later, Francisco was reportedly searching for a sale that could have valued the company at around $1 billion. At the end of 2015, it had an annual revenue of approximately $75 million, according to Reuters.
NSO has clearly had some success at poaching employees from other Israeli vendors in this space. The company’s current director of product management used to work at NICE Systems, which also sells surveillance technology, and its director of business development until recently worked at the defense contractor Elbit Systems. In all, NSO employs at least 200 people, according to its LinkedIn page.
Ironically, or what is likely a clever business decision, Lavie and other NSO employees are also part of Kaymera, a company that promises to do the complete opposite of NSO: protecting phones from hackers’ attacks. The NSO founders, as Bloomberg put it, essentially play “both sides of the cyber wars.”
These latest findings may be the first confirmation that NSO’s reputation might be well deserved.
