Israeli-founded; acquired by U.S. private-equity firm AE Industrial Partners (2024–25) and merged with REDLattice (Virginia).
Paragon sells 'Graphite,' zero-click spyware that, per Meta and Citizen Lab, infected smartphones through apps like WhatsApp with no user interaction, extracting messages and data covertly. Co-founded by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, it was acquired by U.S. private-equity firm AE Industrial Partners and merged with Virginia's REDLattice. In 2025 WhatsApp notified about 90 users that Graphite had targeted them; Citizen Lab and Italy's COPASIR committee tied the spyware to the surveillance of journalists and activists, and reporting traced a paused-then-revived U.S. ICE contract.
Citizen Lab documented Paragon's Graphite zero-click spyware infecting the phones of journalists and civil-society targets — the same mercenary-spyware abuse Paragon marketed itself as being above.