When Cellebrite announced its agreement to acquire Corellium on June 5, 2025, it made headlines, which was understandable given the unmatched innovation that will come from the combination of the two unique and powerful technology companies.

Forbes ran a piece that featured interviews with both Tom Hogan, Cellebrite’s interim CEO and Chris Wade, Corellium’s co-founder and chief technology officer – the same title he will hold at Cellebrite when the transaction closes later in the summer of 2025. Following the announcement, stories ran in many top-tier technology and trade publications, including TechCrunch, The Register, Law360, CyberScoop, The Marker and CTech. 

Tom Hogan and Chris Wade at Corellium“We’ve been a customer of Corellium for many years” Hogan told Forbes and when learning Corellium was looking for a buyer in early 2025, Cellebrite “jumped on that immediately and pursued being their ultimate home.”

Wade added he was excited to work for a company whose technology is used in 1.5 million investigations every year. “That’s a phenomenal statistic. Imagine the real-world impact of that. That was something I wanted to be involved with.”

The Power of the Technology Explained

Corellium’s technology is unique. The best way to illustrate how it works is to tell the story through some real-world case examples:

  • You are a Chief Information Officer at a global bank and you’re rolling out a new mobile banking app. Before Corellium, you maintained an expansive lab of temperamental physical mobile devices to ensure your app was secure on every model of device and every version of every operating system. You also had to ship phones around the world to your remote testers, costing weeks of time. With Corellium, you create virtual phones in the cloud – any model, any version – in seconds. You can run deep, powerful security tests designed specifically for mobile, and you can safely simulate attacks to see how your app behaves. What once took weeks now takes hours. Now, you can release the app on a shortened timeline after a more rigorous testing process. 
  • You are a law enforcement officer investigating massive fraud schemes perpetrated by malware-laced applications available on the App Store and Google Play. You use Corellium to create virtualized devices in a closed environment, download the suspected apps, and see how they attack the device and where they attempt to send the compromised data. You use this information to a) identify the apps that are the sources of the breach, b) alert device manufacturers to the vulnerabilities that those apps have exploited so they can be patched, and c) generate leads to track down the virtual and physical locations of the offenders. 
  • You run a forensics institute working with police academies and federal training facilities. Your core objectives involve delivering practical, scenario-based training that prepares officers for real-world digital investigations and mobile device encounters. Corellium’s virtualization technology enables you to create controlled training environments where officers can practice mobile device search procedures and learn to identify digital evidence without risking actual devices or sensitive data.
  • You are an intelligence officer whose responsibilities include analyzing and tracing state-sponsored malware. You are sent an iCloud backup of a journalist’s phone that has been behaving irregularly since the journalist returned from a visit to China. Without Corellium, you can analyze the backup only in a static state, which is unlikely to yield much insight. With Corellium, you can restore the backup into a virtual device and watch how the malware behaves as though it were on a real physical device. You can see what and how it attacks, the information it is seeking, and identify patterns of behavior that provide clues as to where it may have originated and how it can be guarded against. 

Cellebrite + Corellium logos

The Art of the Possible

As reported in Forbes, there is a beta program underway now with more than a dozen Cellebrite customers who are testing an early potential integration of Cellebrite and Corellium technology. The “Mirror” project enables investigators to make an exact replica of a device in a virtualized environment, which allows investigators to explore the digital evidence – apps, messages, locations – without altering a thing. It’s an interactive snapshot of the device at that moment in time.

As Wade notes in the press release from June 5, 2025, “With Cellebrite’s offerings, users have ‘blueprints’ — technical schematics of what is on a device. With the addition of Corellium’s technology, users will virtually walk through the device, explore every room and open every door safely and without altering a thing in a forensically sound manner.”

Some real-world use cases of Mirror could include the following:

  • You are a juror seated on a murder trial with someone’s fate in your hands. A significant amount of evidence in court comes from the defendant’s mobile phone. Today, prosecutors and jurors have to wade through reports and screenshots of the digital evidence. With Corellium, you get to view the phone exactly as the suspect interacted with it on the night of the murder – who they texted, where they drove, what they looked up. You’re seeing an exact virtual replica of the device(s) on a big screen in the courtroom – making the evidence visual, understandable and relatable.  
  • You are a government official traveling to a country that is known to interfere with mobile devices. Before you leave, you preserve the full file system of your device within Corellium. When you return, you extract the full file system again and run the virtualized devices side by side in Corellium to see any changes in behavior or anomalous communications with the device involving unknown sources that could indicate the device has been compromised. If any indication is found, you destroy the physical device while continuing to analyze the nature and source of the breach in a walled-off environment. 

Excitement continues to mount about this partnership, and the Cellebrite team looks forward to officially welcoming the Corellium team when the transaction closes later this summer.

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