Emmanuel Benzaquen and the business of staying

An exit is a curious name for something that leaves you coming back to work. In March 2020, Checkmarx announced a deal valuing the application-security company at $1.15 billion. Emmanuel Benzaquen, its co-founder and chief executive, stayed. Three years later, when he handed the CEO role to Sandeep Johri, he stayed again, this time on the board. The transaction supplied the conspicuous number. The continuing attachment supplies the more interesting story.

Benzaquen spent 17 years running a company concerned with the things software does when its authors would rather it didn’t. Checkmarx helped developers examine code for vulnerabilities before those weaknesses became somebody else’s opportunity. Its customers had to trust both the findings and the business delivering them. In that world, a good demonstration might begin a conversation. Building a durable company required considerably more conversations after it.

His career had already crossed France, Britain, California and Israel before Checkmarx became its longest chapter. He had worked around chips, embedded software, acquisitions and business development. When he joined forces with Maty Siman in 2006, he brought an operator’s experience to a programmer’s idea. Their partnership would outlast funding rounds, an acquisition and, eventually, his own tenure in the chief executive’s chair.

The long way from Paris

Born in Paris, Benzaquen completed a master’s degree in electrical engineering and went to Britain to begin doctoral work in robotics and computer science. Business pulled harder. He moved to California, completed an executive MBA and spent a decade in Silicon Valley’s software and semiconductor industries. The itinerary suggests a man willing to change direction before the previous direction had become a life sentence.

His roles included work at Embedded Performance, Illuminator and Argonaut RISC Core, known as ARC. At ARC in San Jose, he headed business development; the company went public in 2000. This was an education in the less photogenic part of technology: how a technical proposition becomes an agreement, how companies work together and how a product finds a buyer who can actually use it.

Between 2003 and 2005, he travelled frequently between the United States and Israel, consulting in technology. He eventually made the move to Israel. There he encountered Siman’s application-security idea. After years spent helping commercialise other technologies, Benzaquen committed himself to a business whose premise was unusually easy to understand: software ought to be examined for the weaknesses that make it dangerous to trust.

Two founders, different jobs

Siman had identified a gap between working software and secure software. A program could do what its creators intended while also allowing an attacker to do something they had never intended. Checkmarx’s early proposition was to inspect the code itself and help developers find security flaws while they could still change it. The useful moment was before release, when the problem remained within the development team’s reach.

The division of labour mattered. Siman concentrated on technology as founder and CTO; Benzaquen ran the company. Asked about handing management over, Siman explained that people should recognise what they do well and bring in someone else for the rest. It is an admirably economical hiring philosophy. It also requires a founder to resist the temptation to occupy every important chair.

Their later accounts retain that sense of partnership. In his 2023 handover message, Benzaquen thanked Siman for years of friendship alongside the business relationship. It is easy to draw an organisation chart with two boxes at the top. It is harder to keep the people in those boxes working together for nearly two decades, particularly when one is selling the promise that the other must keep building.

A scanner needs a willing programmer

Benzaquen’s commercial argument paid close attention to the person receiving the security warning. Developers were being asked to deliver quickly. Security checks could look like another delay imposed by another department. A tool that discovered a problem and then interrupted the entire working day had created a second problem of its own. Adoption belonged in the product discussion, alongside detection.

By 2016, he was arguing for education that was immediate, interactive and available inside the developer’s existing work. The lesson should arrive when the developer needed it, with enough practical involvement to stick. Anyone who has sat through a long presentation about a problem they do not currently have will recognise the courtesy in that approach.

Checkmarx acquired Codebashing in July 2017, adding short, interactive secure-coding lessons to its offering. The acquisition extended the company’s attention from finding mistakes to helping people avoid repeating them. A warning becomes more useful when the recipient understands how to act on it. Training, in that arrangement, earns its place through usefulness rather than through the number of slides completed.

The business kept expanding around the original code scanner. It added consulting capabilities through Custodela and, in 2021, acquired Dustico to address malicious code and backdoors in open-source software supply chains. Benzaquen was leading a company whose field of responsibility grew as the ways software was assembled grew more complicated. The early insight still mattered; keeping it commercially useful required new tools around it.

“When software is everywhere security is everything.”Emmanuel Benzaquen

The number with nine zeros

By the time Hellman & Friedman announced its agreement in March 2020, Checkmarx served more than 1,400 customers in 70 countries. Insight Partners, the selling investor, would retain a substantial minority interest. The $1.15 billion valuation attached a price to years of work that, for customers, was supposed to prevent an unwelcome event from happening at all.

Benzaquen later described a concentrated process in which prospective private-equity investors were given two weeks to examine the company and decide. He saw a chance to establish its value and bring in new shareholders. The speed of that process makes a pleasing contrast with the time spent creating something worth examining. A fortnight can be enough for a decision after fourteen years of preparation.

The company’s scale had become visible before the transaction. In 2019, Checkmarx had recorded revenue growth of more than 60 percent over the preceding year and the addition of 400 large-enterprise customers. Its organisation also extended across 18 countries. These were historical measures of a business extending its reach, and of the management burden that came with each additional market.

The deal became an obvious milestone in the Checkmarx story. Benzaquen’s own stated ambition reached past it: a company capable of continuing, employing people and developing its work. Selling control and continuing to run the business can coexist quite comfortably. The vocabulary of startup exits is less accommodating. It rather insists that everyone must already be near the door.

The people behind the pipeline

When Benzaquen wrote about management in 2022, he returned to emotional connection. Recruiting and training skilled people took time. Asking them merely to produce code offered a thin reason to stay. He described investing in managers and communicating frequently with employees, including when there was no major announcement. In a distributed company, silence can become an organisational habit surprisingly quickly.

On LinkedIn that year, he connected Checkmarx’s participation in the Tel Aviv Pride Parade with his preference for employees who brought enthusiasm and individuality to work. “Passion, like love, is unique but not uniform,” he wrote. The thought allowed for differences in people’s interests rather than demanding that everyone display commitment in the same company-approved manner.

There were practical encounters beyond the employee base, too. Checkmarx hosted 50 students from Loop, an organisation promoting technology and coding among Arabic-speaking young people. Siman discussed the company’s beginnings; Benzaquen spoke about setting goals and committing to them. Other sessions introduced product development, marketing, careers and training. The students were being shown that technology companies contain many kinds of work.

These accounts give substance to his interest in people. They also deserve to sit beside the harder parts of running a business. In November 2022, Checkmarx cut roughly 100 positions, including 40 in Israel. Benzaquen said the company was reorganising and concentrating resources in response to market conditions. A culture built around connection still had to confront decisions that broke some of those connections.

A different chair at the same table

On February 28, 2023, Checkmarx announced Johri as Benzaquen’s successor. By then, the company reported more than 1,800 customers worldwide. Johri brought experience from enterprise software and continuous testing. Benzaquen would remain a director, with his attention moving towards strategy. The change ended a long run in one job while preserving a role in the organisation he had helped create.

His own farewell to the CEO position was expansive in its thanks: employees, customers, partners, investors, family and Siman. He described an intention to pursue entrepreneurship, innovation and a contribution to society while continuing to support Checkmarx. The aspirations were broad, but the ongoing board role gave one of them a specific address. There was still work to do at the company.

In August 2024, the announcement welcoming Inbal Shani to the board placed him there alongside Siman and Johri. He continues to be recognised among Checkmarx’s founders. A company can accumulate products, investors and executives while retaining the names of the people who accepted its earliest uncertainties. That continuity is part of what makes a business feel like an institution.

Benzaquen’s story resists being reduced to the acquisition price because he kept participating after the price had been agreed. Paris, Silicon Valley and Israel explain the route. The partnership with Siman explains much of the construction. The years after the deal reveal what he wanted from it: a business with enough life of its own to continue, and enough personal meaning to remain worth his time.