Guy Tytunovich and the problem with a perfect customer

When Guy Tytunovich was seven, his father brought home a fax machine. Tytunovich wondered whether there were little people inside. It is an excellent question to ask a machine that appears to turn a distant human being into a sheet of paper. Years later, recounting the episode in a founder interview, he described it as the beginning of his interest in hacking. The equipment has changed. The question about who is inside has proved rather durable.

Tytunovich is the co-founder and CEO of CHEQ, a cybersecurity company concerned with the authenticity of digital activity. His working world is full of visitors who arrive on websites, click advertisements, complete forms, and look reassuringly like customers. Some are automated. Some are deceptive. A business can spend good money welcoming them, then spend more money learning the wrong lessons from their visit.

The particular turn in his story is that he learned advertising after working in intelligence. That sequence gave him two ways to look at the same screen. A marketer could see an audience. An intelligence officer could see an identity that needed checking. CHEQ grew in the space between those interpretations. Today, as AI agents begin acting for actual customers, his company faces a more awkward assignment: deciding which machines deserve to come in.

An intelligence officer walks into advertising

Tytunovich dates his entry into technology to 2003, when he joined the research wing of Israeli defense intelligence through the Haman Talpiot program. He served for most of a decade. His later account of that training emphasizes the practical pressure to accomplish more with limited manpower. Automation and speed were necessities before they became product language.

After military service, he co-founded AdZouk and BigaBid. Advertising supplied an education in a different kind of uncertainty: whether the thing a customer bought was the thing a customer received. The industry had verification tools, but Tytunovich believed their methods were too blunt for the complexity of fraud and unsafe advertising placements. His answer drew on cybersecurity and natural language processing.

CHEQ’s early proposition included preventing fraudulent impressions and keeping advertisements away from unsuitable material. Those sound like technical housekeeping chores until a recognizable brand pays to appear in the wrong place. Tytunovich treated the problem as something to interrupt while it was happening. A report delivered after the money had gone would leave the advertiser admirably informed and still out of pocket.

His public telling of the early sales effort is refreshingly ordinary. He made calls. He asked for introductions. Participation in The Bridge connected CHEQ with companies including Coca-Cola, Turner, and Mercedes-Benz. There was no exemption from the founder’s familiar occupation of trying to persuade somebody to take the next meeting.

The customer who teaches you the wrong lesson

By 2021, Tytunovich was describing a problem wider than the price of a fraudulent click. Fake visitors could enter customer databases, contaminate analytics, and distort the models businesses use to find their next audience. In that account, the waste could reproduce itself. A company might use unreliable evidence to choose where its next advertising dollar should go.

Consider the logic of that problem. A dashboard can count an interaction with immaculate precision and still be counting something useless. A sales team can dutifully pursue a lead that should never have become a lead. The numbers may reconcile beautifully. Their relationship with a prospective customer remains another matter. This is why Tytunovich’s pitch reached beyond the person buying advertisements.

He described buyers across marketing, sales, business intelligence, operations, and security. CHEQ called the discipline go-to-market security: protection for the machinery that attracts, measures, and converts business. The name matters because it gives responsibility somewhere to live. A suspicious visitor can otherwise pass through several departments, each of them assuming the next one has checked the invitation.

In a 2022 conversation, Tytunovich recalled recognizing how many vulnerabilities sat inside marketing technology. The realization followed his deliberate move into marketing and adtech after government cyber work. It explains the unusual customer for a cybersecurity founder: the executive responsible for winning business, whose tools are designed to encourage participation and whose incentives reward more of it.

Before a budget, a vocabulary

Building a product for that buyer involved another piece of work: helping the buyer recognize the category. In his 2024 discussion of CHEQ’s origins, Tytunovich described matching the product’s timing to emerging needs, winning support without an established budget, and developing repeatable sales operations. A useful diagnosis can arrive before an organization has a line item to address it.

His later interview with Boardroom Club returned to the difficulty of persuading security leaders and other decision-makers that the exposure existed. The instruction he offered was compact: “Explain the problem in the context that my buyer understands.” It is less glamorous than announcing a new market. It is also something a salesperson can actually do on a Tuesday.

In February 2022, CHEQ announced a $150 million Series C led by Tiger Global, with participation from existing investors and Key1 Capital. Tytunovich’s own explanation of the raise centered on trust in business data, pipelines, and performance. He outlined spending on product development, recruitment, geographic expansion, and education of the market.

The size of that round makes an arresting number. His argument behind it was about an everyday dependency: organizations had assembled expensive systems for attracting and understanding customers, and those systems needed dependable inputs. He wanted security to become a routine part of that apparatus. The ambition was to make checking the visitor as ordinary as measuring the visit.

“Explain the problem in the context that my buyer understands.”Guy Tytunovich · Boardroom Club interview, 2025

People need room to run

The organization behind that ambition has its own geography. CHEQ opened New York operations in 2019. In 2021, its team described the city as a place to find experienced talent, customers’ decision-makers, agencies, and investors close together. Tytunovich liked the combination of established business and technology. A company selling to large organizations had practical reasons to go where those organizations conducted business.

The management model he described gave regional teams substantial autonomy, with their own sales and customer-success leadership. Central functions remained in Tel Aviv. Expansion, in this version, required leaders who could operate at a distance rather than wait for every instruction to arrive from headquarters. The map was also a delegation chart.

His public advice on building a large company comes back to people. In a 2024 post, he argued for hiring capable colleagues, giving them freedom to create and run, and supporting them. In an earlier interview, he described combining outside executive recruitment with internal promotion. These are concrete preferences about how work gets done, rather than a collection of flattering adjectives about leadership.

There is room for a joke in the operation, too. CHEQ recruited basketball player Dikembe Mutombo for its website as a Chief Blocking Officer. A company selling protection from unwanted traffic could scarcely have asked for a more literal sporting metaphor. The title made a technical product intelligible before anyone had opened a diagram.

Some machines have shopping lists

By January 2025, Tytunovich was publicly discussing a change in the cast of characters online. Alongside malicious bots and routine automation came machine customers: AI-driven agents acting within commerce. In a conversation about that shift, he explored how companies might have to redesign digital experiences for visitors that do not browse as people do. CHEQ said it served more than 15,000 companies at the time.

That same month, CHEQ announced its acquisition of Deduce, adding identity-fraud technology to its platform. The deal connected traffic analysis with identity intelligence. Tytunovich framed the objective around protecting the customer journey while preserving legitimate revenue opportunities and keeping the experience usable. The difficulty was becoming more specific than separating humans from software.

In June 2026, CHEQ announced Agent Intent, with a launch scheduled for Cannes Lions on June 22. The product described four dimensions: the entity behind a visitor, whether its identity was authentic, what it intended to do, and the action a business should take. Possible responses included allowing, blocking, redirecting, or limiting traffic. Tytunovich distilled the central question to “what does it want?”

There is a useful tension here for someone whose company made its case by challenging fake customers. Software can now arrive on behalf of a real one. An indiscriminate refusal would defeat the commercial purpose of the website. In Tytunovich’s account of this market, the business needs enough context to make a decision at the moment of contact. The welcome mat needs judgment.

The crowd outside the shop

Tytunovich’s concern with authenticity also extends into public life. In September 2026, he warned that AI-generated material and increasingly convincing automated accounts could intensify election influence campaigns in Israel. He called for regulation and described how manufactured engagement could help false material circulate. These were his warnings about a risk, rather than established measurements of an election outcome.

The connection to his commercial work is direct. A business can mistake automated activity for consumer demand. A reader can mistake coordinated engagement for public agreement. In both cases, the visible crowd may encourage a consequential decision before anyone has checked who assembled it. His subject is the distance between an event on a screen and the meaning people assign to it.

His published essays have followed the same questions through data contamination, social-platform verification, privacy, and the motives behind bot attacks. The recurring interest is in the conditions under which an interaction deserves trust. That gives his career a coherence that the succession of industry labels can obscure: intelligence, advertising verification, go-to-market security, and now AI-agent intent.

His reading recommendations add a small, pleasing detail to the portrait. In a 2022 podcast, he named Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive. One puts absurdity to work in a universe of troublesome machines; the other examines the moments when a business must change. These are his recommendations, rather than a claim that either book explains his decisions. They make a fitting pair on the reading list of someone trying to understand a web whose customers keep changing shape.

The child confronting the fax machine imagined people where there appeared to be machinery. The executive confronting the modern web has spent years finding machinery where businesses imagined people. Now the two have become entangled: a machine may have a person’s instructions and a perfectly legitimate errand. For Guy Tytunovich, the interesting part is finding out who sent it, and whether it should get past the door.