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About Certora
Certora provides formal verification tools and smart contract auditing services for blockchain protocols. Its core product, the Certora Prover, uses mathematical methods to verify that contract code satisfies specified properties, rather than relying on pattern matching or manual review alone.
The market pain point is that traditional code audits and testing cannot exhaustively cover all possible execution paths, especially for complex DeFi protocols where subtle logic errors can lead to catastrophic financial losses. Certora's approach allows developers to write formal specifications in its CVL language and prove that the code behaves correctly across all possible states and inputs.
In the past six months (March to September 2026), Certora launched AutoProver, an AI-driven system that automatically reads code and documentation, generates formal specifications, and produces verification reports. The company also published a security framework developed with Aave for the Aave V4 protocol, which involved continuous formal verification throughout the development cycle rather than a one-time audit. Additionally, Certora hosted livestream discussions highlighting that DeFi attacks are increasingly targeting off-chain infrastructure and operational processes, not just smart contract logic, and emphasized the need for continuous security practices beyond point-in-time audits.
Certora was founded by Shmuel Sagiv, a pioneer of formal verification, based on decades of academic research, bringing mathematical proof to smart contract security. Since 2020, Certora has provided formal verification for Aave, discovering multiple critical vulnerabilities in Aave V1 and continuously safeguarding V2 and V3. In total, it reviewed over 120 contracts, wrote more than 800 rules, and found 28 significant bugs, preventing billions of dollars in losses. Additionally, in Sushiswap's Trident, Certora discovered and prevented a critical vulnerability that could have drained the pool. In 2022, Certora raised a $36 million Series B round led by Jump Crypto.
In February 2025, Certora open-sourced its core Prover, enabling developers to freely use industrial-grade formal verification tools, marking a paradigm shift from manual auditing to mathematical guarantees in smart contract security.
In the past six months, Certora made key strides in smart contract security. In March 2026, Certora and Aave unveiled the Aave V4 security framework after six years of collaboration. By integrating formal verification, adversarial testing, and manual auditing from early development, they reviewed 169 contracts and 51,000+ lines of code, wrote 800+ rules, and prevented 28 critical vulnerabilities. In May 2026, Certora won a ~$300K Canton Foundation grant to build an open-source static analysis tool for Daml, automating cross-package interaction checks and integrating with the dpm CLI to strengthen multi-party trust. Looking ahead, Certora prioritizes shifting from point-in-time audits to continuous security engineering, embedding verification into development pipelines, and expanding into institutional multi-party systems and zero-knowledge execution environments (e.g., zkEVM) by open-sourcing specs and reusable frameworks.
Co-founders:
Shelly Grossman, Co-founder and CTO.
Current core executives:
Mooly Sagiv, CEO; Saurabh Sharma, Board Member; Andrew Flesch, VP Global Sales; Idit Kronzon, VP; Sofi Vissani, VP Sales; Elad Erdheim, VP Research Security Lab; Maya Glik Dubovi, VP Customer Success; Ilya Leybovich, VP Marketing.
Certora's recent team changes: Senior Security Researcher Jelle Goethals joined in January 2025 and departed in August 2026. According to public sources, Certora's security research team quadrupled in size during 2025 and continued expanding, with total employees reaching 125 as of March 2026. Despite the exit of a key researcher, the overall team remains on a growth trajectory.