Israeli cybersecurity company Checkmarx raises $84M from Insight Venture Partners
Simona Weinglass / GeekTime :
Context & Ripple Effects
In mid-2015, Checkmarx was one of Israel's application-security specialists taking growth-stage money rather than selling early: the $84M round made Insight Venture Partners its owner and lead backer. The bet fit a busy moment for Israeli security — months later Claroty exited stealth with $32M from Bessemer and Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors, and Check Point paid $175M for cloud security startup Dome9 two years after that.
What makes this round worth revisiting is where it landed: five years on, Insight-owned Checkmarx agreed to be bought by PE firm Hellman & Friedman at a $1.15B valuation, with Insight keeping a minority stake — turning the 2015 growth check into roughly a ten-figure outcome and validating Insight's Israeli security playbook alongside deals like Armis and Episerver.
First-order effects
- Checkmarx gains $84M of balance-sheet room to scale its code-scanning business without an early trade sale, while Insight Venture Partners takes ownership of a core asset in its Israeli security portfolio.
Second-order effects
- The round raises the bar for Israeli security rivals chasing the same enterprise buyers — Claroty's $32M stealth exit and Cyberbit's later $70M raise show peers matching growth-capital checks, and Check Point's $175M Dome9 acquisition signals strategics paying up to keep pace.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Israeli cybersecurity matures along a PE arc — VC growth round, majority control by a specialist investor, then a billion-dollar secondary buyout like Hellman & Friedman's — making security firms institutional assets rather than quick acquisitions.
The trend: Israeli cybersecurity is moving from venture-funded startup bets toward private-equity-owned scale-ups, with Insight Venture Partners' Checkmarx-to-Hellman & Friedman path as the template.