PE Firm to Buy Application Security Specialist Checkmarx at $1.15 Billion Valuation

16 March 2020

PE Firm to Buy Application Security Specialist Checkmarx at $1.15 Billion Valuation

Checkmarx, a provider of tools for testing source code for security issues, announced on Monday that private equity firm Hellman & Friedman (“H&F”) has agreed to acquire a majority of the Company from Insight Partners in a deal valuing Checkmarx at $1.15 billion.

Insight Partners, which will continue to own a substantial minority interest in Checkmarx, originally took an $85 million stake in the company in June 2015.

Checkmarx was founded in 2006 and led since by CEO Emmanuel Benzaquen, and Maty Siman, Founder and CTO. SecurityWeek interviewed Siman back 2012, when the company had just 35 employees. The company now has more than 700 employees and more than 1,400 customers across 70 countries.

“Checkmarx enables organizations to deliver secure software faster, by making security excellence intrinsic to software development,” Checkmarx explaines. “By bringing to light vulnerabilities within software solutions, Checkmarx is a critical ally to the developers and application security experts of the world’s leading brands discovering and reporting security threats before disaster strikes.”

While Insight Partners has shed most of its stake in Checkmarx, the investment firm continues to be active on the buy-side. In May 2019, Insight Partners agreed to acquire a controlling interest in threat intelligence firm Recorded Future for more than $780 million. In January 2020, the firm also agreed to acquire IoT security firm Armis in a cash deal valuing the firm at $1.1 billion.

For more than 10 years, Mike Lennon has been closely monitoring the threat landscape and analyzing trends in the National Security and enterprise cybersecurity space. In his role at SecurityWeek, he oversees the editorial direction of the publication and is the Director of several leading security industry conferences around the world.