06-main-dossier.md

Key Findings

• Economic: Snyk operationally absorbed two Tel Aviv-founded startups - Enso Security (2023) and Helios (2024) - into its own engineering organization, and maintained a Tel Aviv office as one of its global hubs until an approximately 90-person layoff round in June 2026 that reporting describes as discontinuing the Israel development centre entirely.¹²³⁴
• Political: Snyk’s only conflict-specific public statement, in October 2023, was an employee-welfare message keeping the Tel Aviv office open for local staff safety - materially thinner than its named donation and business-suspension response to the Russia-Ukraine war.⁵⁶⁷
• Founders: the company’s three co-founders are widely reported in trade press to have backgrounds in IDF Unit 8200 or IDF cyber R&D, but this is founder biography rather than an ongoing institutional or defence-brand tie, and Snyk’s own “About” materials do not foreground military heritage.⁸⁹¹⁰
• Not found: no contract, tender, or partnership was identified between Snyk and Israel’s Ministry of Defense, the IDF, or any Israeli security body, and no evidence placed Snyk in Project Nimbus, the OHCHR settlement-business database, or any UN/NGO complicity list.¹¹¹²¹³

Target Profile

Key Facts:

• Snyk was founded in July 2015 by Guy Podjarny, Assaf Hefetz, and Danny Grander, who began operations “out of Tel Aviv and London” after investors told Podjarny “it is impossible to set up a cyber company without a branch in Israel.”⁸⁹
• Co-founder Danny Grander previously served as CTO/head of research at Gita Technologies, an Israeli signals-intelligence and interception-technology firm later acquired by Verint Systems in 2016; he stepped back from Snyk’s day-to-day role in 2021.²⁵²⁶
• Eli Cohen, co-founder/CEO of Helios (acquired by Snyk in January 2024) and now Snyk’s Director of Technology Incubation, served in IDF Unit 8200 from 2005–2009 before his technology career.²⁷²⁸
• Company-wide revenue was reported at $220 million (2023) and $278 million (2024); headcount has been reported at roughly 1,000–1,400 (2022) and around 1,150–1,200 in 2024–2026.⁸¹⁸

Executive Summary

Snyk is a privately held, Boston- and London-headquartered application-security software company founded in 2015 by three Israeli entrepreneurs, two of whom are reported to have IDF Unit 8200 or cyber-R&D backgrounds, and which has operated a Tel Aviv engineering office as one of roughly a dozen global hubs since inception.⁸⁹ Its documented Israel nexus is almost entirely corporate and commercial rather than military, governmental, or security-sector: an operating office, two acquisitions of Tel Aviv-founded startups (Enso Security in 2023 and Helios in 2024), a sovereign-wealth-backed funding round, and a founder biography that trade press routinely frames as “Israeli-founded cyber unicorn.”²²⁸¹⁴ Across four independent domain audits - military, digital, economic, and political - the evidentiary record does not support any direct or indirect Snyk relationship with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, the IDF, Israeli intelligence services, or Israeli settlement infrastructure.¹¹¹³¹²

The strongest documented vectors sit in the economic domain: Snyk’s Tel Aviv office functioned as an operational engineering hub with real headcount, product-development responsibility, and two completed acquisitions of Israeli startups whose valuations are variously reported (with an unresolved discrepancy between Israeli trade-press estimates of roughly $45–50 million and $50+ million for Enso Security, and a lower $32.7 million figure from a secondary financial-research source).^2930313218 That same economic footprint, however, was reportedly wound down: 2026 reporting describes a fourth round of layoffs - approximately 90 employees, characterized in press coverage as effectively discontinuing Snyk’s entire Israel development-centre staff - attributed to competitive displacement from AI-native coding-security tools rather than to any Israel-specific policy decision.⁴³³²⁴ The political domain shows a comparatively thin, asymmetric response to the conflict: Snyk’s only identified statement tied to the October 2023 Hamas attack was an employee-welfare message from then-CEO Peter McKay confirming the Tel Aviv office remained open for local staff, in contrast to the company’s named, dollar-quantified donation and formal business-suspension response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.⁵⁶⁷

What is not supported by the evidence is any material military or digital-surveillance nexus. No public evidence identified of Snyk contracts, tenders, or partnerships with Israel’s Ministry of Defense, the IDF, the Israel Prison Service, or Israeli intelligence agencies; no evidence of dual-use, tactical, or mil-spec product variants; no evidence of supply-chain integration with Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries, Rafael, or IMI Systems; and no evidence of Snyk in Project Nimbus or any Israeli sovereign cloud programme.¹¹¹² Civil-society and UN monitoring sources reviewed for this dossier - the OHCHR business-and-human-rights database, the Special Rapporteur’s July 2025 “economy of genocide” report, the PAX “Companies Arming Israel” report, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre’s tech-sector briefing, Who Profits, and the “No Tech for Apartheid” campaign - do not name Snyk.^{11341335361237} The only adverse civil-society reference located is a single, non-institutional Medium listicle that includes Snyk in a broad catalogue of “Israeli tech companies” without a specific allegation.³⁸

Consistent with this evidentiary pattern, the FINAL V4-vetted BDS-1000 score for Snyk is BRS 367, Tier D (Moderate), driven almost entirely by the Economic domain (Economic = 5.36), with negligible Military (0.01) and Digital (0.05) scores and a modest Political domain (2.47) reflecting founder biography, funding-source framing, and the asymmetric conflict response rather than any settlement, defence, or surveillance activity.

Timeline of Relevant Events

Corporate Overview

Snyk Limited was incorporated in the United Kingdom in July 2015, with the company’s stated operational and commercial headquarters now in Boston, Massachusetts.⁸¹ Its own materials describe the company’s origin as being built “out of Tel Aviv and London,” and its live global-office listing includes Boston, London, Tel Aviv, Ottawa, and Zurich alongside smaller hubs in Bucharest, Cluj, Lisbon, San Francisco, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo, with the Tel Aviv office listed at 28 HaArba’a Street, Tel Aviv-Yafo - within Israel’s internationally recognized 1949 boundaries, with no identified separate office or facility in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or the Golan Heights.⁸¹¹⁰ Snyk’s acquisition history spans both Israeli and non-Israeli targets: on the Israeli side, Enso Security (Tel Aviv, 2023) and Helios (Tel Aviv, 2024); on the non-Israeli side, DeepCode (Switzerland/ETH Zurich), Manifold (Canada), FossID (Sweden), CloudSkiff (France), Fugue (US), Probely (Portugal), Invariant Labs (Switzerland), and Reviewpad (Portugal).⁸²⁹ Both Enso and Helios were absorbed directly into Snyk’s own engineering and product organization rather than retained as arm’s-length suppliers.²³

Governance has been in flux through 2025–2026. Podjarny served as CEO from 2015–2019 and President from 2019–2025 before stepping down from the board in March 2025, then returning as Chairman in February 2026 following CEO Peter McKay’s own announced departure (completed in April 2026, with CFO Ken MacAskill installed as interim CEO).^4748212223 Board membership has otherwise included Mike Scarpelli, Sanjay Poonen, Ken Fox, Ping Li, Philippe Botteri, Tamar Yehoshua (who joined in 2021 and holds a Hebrew University of Jerusalem computer-science degree - an educational credential, not an institutional research tie), and Kathleen Annala; none of these members is documented as holding any personal Israel-company investment or advocacy-organization role.¹⁹²⁰⁴⁹ No public evidence identified of Israeli state ownership stakes, Israeli-government board appointees, or a critical-national-infrastructure designation for Snyk; the company’s only confirmed government-sector relationship is a U.S. FedRAMP Moderate Authorization and associated U.S. federal customer base, not an Israeli one.⁴⁵⁴⁶⁵⁰

Domain Summaries

Military: Military

Mechanism of Involvement

No public evidence identified of any contract, tender, framework agreement, or MOU between Snyk and Israel’s Ministry of Defense, the IDF, the Israel Prison Service, the Israel Border Police, or any Israeli defence-export directory (e.g., SIBAT).⁸ Snyk’s product line - open-source dependency scanning, static code analysis, and cloud/container security tooling for enterprise developers - has no ruggedised, tactical, mil-spec, or defence-grade variant, no FedRAMP DoD Impact Level accreditation, and no documented export-licence history specific to Israeli defence or security end-users.⁸ The company has no manufacturing, vehicle, or heavy-machinery line and no documented equipment, construction, or engineering role at checkpoints, the separation barrier, detention facilities, or military bases.⁸ No public evidence identified of Snyk supplying components, sub-systems, or specialist manufacturing services to Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, or IMI Systems/Elbit Land, nor of any munitions, weapons-system, or strategic-platform role.⁸ The sole military-adjacent thread is biographical: co-founders Guy Podjarny and Danny Grander are reported to have served in IDF cyber/intelligence and R&D units respectively before founding Snyk, and Danny Grander was previously CTO/head of research at Gita Technologies - an Israeli signals-intelligence and interception-technology firm later acquired by Verint Systems in 2016 - stepping back from Snyk’s operational role in 2021.⁸²⁵²⁶ Eli Cohen, co-founder of the acquired company Helios and now a Snyk Labs director, served in IDF Unit 8200 (2005–2009) prior to his technology career.²⁷²⁸ These are pre-Snyk or acquired-company employment histories, not corporate acts by Snyk itself.

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

Snyk’s business model - B2B developer-security SaaS with no defence-sector customer base, no physical products, and no export-controlled technology category - structurally limits its exposure to this domain. The company remains privately held with no SEC filings that would disclose defence-related risk factors, and repeated, differently-worded searches across procurement databases, defence directories, and export-control records returned no matching relationship. No organised boycott or divestment campaign targeting Snyk on defence-sector grounds was identified.⁸

Named Entities and Evidence Map

Digital: Digital

Mechanism of Involvement

Snyk’s confirmed technology-alliance relationships include SentinelOne (an Israeli-founded, U.S.-headquartered firm) for a build-time/runtime vulnerability-correlation integration, and Carahsoft as its authorized U.S. public-sector reseller (SEWP V, NASPO ValuePoint, OMNIA Partners), with no reference to Israeli technology mandates in the reseller agreement.⁵¹⁵²⁵⁰ Snyk’s regional data-hosting options are the United States, Frankfurt (Germany), and Australia; no Israel-based hosting region exists.⁵³⁵⁴ Snyk achieved FedRAMP Moderate Authorization in April 2025 for U.S. federal-government use and maintains a documented U.S. Small Business Administration case study.⁴⁵⁴⁶⁵⁵ No public evidence identified of Snyk participation in Project Nimbus or any Israeli state-backed cloud programme, of Snyk providing biometric, facial-recognition, predictive-policing, or surveillance technology of Israeli origin, or of any commercial or licensing relationship with Check Point, Wiz, CyberArk, NSO Group, Cellebrite, or Verint.⁸ Snyk’s AI-related work (the DeepCode acquisition and 2026 “AI security” R&D reorganization) is marketed to general enterprise developers, with no public evidence identified of AI/ML systems supplied to Israeli state, military, or security bodies.⁸

The company’s R&D footprint in Israel is well documented but has contracted sharply: after earlier reported reductions (30, 198, and 128 employees since 2022), Snyk reportedly laid off its entire roughly 90-person Israel development-centre staff around June 24–25, 2026, attributed to competitive displacement from AI-native code-scanning tools (with “Claude Code” explicitly named in coverage) and investor preference for AI-native companies.^433432444 This is treated as evidence that the Israel R&D presence has been discontinued rather than ongoing.

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

Snyk’s technology stack is defensive and developer-facing by design - a vulnerability database intended to help developers remediate third-party open-source risk, not an offensive or surveillance capability.⁸ Its only confirmed government-technology relationship (FedRAMP, Carahsoft, SBA) runs to the U.S. federal government, not Israel. Live review of the OHCHR business-enterprise database and the Who Profits company database returned no Snyk entry, and no UN Special Rapporteur report or “No Tech for Apartheid”-style campaign material names the company.¹¹¹²³⁷ The single adverse civil-society reference found - a self-published Medium listicle citing only Snyk’s Israeli origin, with no specific allegation - is treated as low evidentiary value.³⁸

Named Entities and Evidence Map

Economic: Economic

Mechanism of Involvement

Snyk’s Israel economic footprint centres on a Tel Aviv office (one of the company’s global engineering hubs) and two completed acquisitions of Tel Aviv-founded startups: Enso Security (announced June 2023; Israeli/US trade press estimates of ~$45–50 million or “over $50 million,” versus a lower $32.7 million figure from a secondary financial-research source - an unresolved discrepancy) and Helios (announced January 2024; described in Israeli press as worth “tens of millions of dollars,” versus a $2.9 million figure from the same secondary source - a second unresolved discrepancy).^229303132328 Both companies were folded into Snyk’s own product organization rather than retained as third-party vendors. On the capital side, Snyk’s $196.5 million Series G (December 2022, $7.4 billion valuation) was led by the Qatar Investment Authority - a Qatari, not Israeli, sovereign fund - with the balance of its disclosed investor base (Accel, Boldstart, Canaan, Tiger Global, Coatue, T. Rowe Price, Baillie Gifford, BlackRock, GV, and others) consisting exclusively of non-Israeli venture and institutional capital.^1415161718 Company-wide revenue was disclosed at $220 million (2023) and $278 million (2024, 26% growth), with no Israel-specific revenue breakdown available given the company’s private, non-SEC-filing status.⁸¹⁸

Snyk’s Tel Aviv office has continued to appear on the company’s live global-offices listing, but the June 2026 layoff round reportedly discontinued its Israel development-centre staff entirely.¹⁴³³ No public evidence identified of Snyk operations, dealerships, or facilities in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or the Golan Heights, and the company’s B2B SaaS model has no retail storefronts or physical distribution network of the kind relevant to settlement-nexus analysis.⁸¹

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

Snyk is not a manufacturer, importer, or retailer of physical goods, and no public evidence identified of any relationship with Israeli agricultural exporters or physical-goods supply chains. Its acquisitions were of software companies, absorbed into its own operations rather than sustained as external Israeli supplier relationships. Its largest identified funding round was led by a Qatari, not Israeli, sovereign entity, and its shareholder base is otherwise composed of globally diversified venture and institutional investors with no distinct Israel-focused mandate.¹⁴¹⁸ Cross-checks against the Who Profits database, the OHCHR settlement-business database, and comparable civil-society monitoring resources returned no Snyk-specific findings.¹¹¹² The reported June 2026 discontinuation of the Israel R&D operation - if accurate - is itself an exculpatory data point under this dossier’s divestment/exit mitigation standard, reducing rather than sustaining the company’s economic nexus going forward.

Named Entities and Evidence Map

Political: Political

Mechanism of Involvement

Snyk issued no standalone corporate policy statement on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Gaza, or the West Bank on its own news/blog channels.⁵⁶ The only documented leadership commentary tied to the conflict is CEO Peter McKay’s October 2023 statement that “the well being of our Israeli employees is our primary concern,” confirming the Tel Aviv office stayed open for local staff safety, and a separate LinkedIn post by McKay opposing proposed changes to Israeli anti-discrimination law, framed around diversity rather than the conflict.⁵⁵⁷ By contrast, Snyk’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was specific and quantified: a $100,000 donation to United Help Ukraine, doubled free-tier user limits, and a formal announcement that it was “ceasing business in Russia and Belarus.”⁶⁷ No equivalent named-organization donation or business-policy change tied to the Israel-Gaza war was identified. Snyk’s co-founders’ Unit 8200/IDF cyber R&D backgrounds are repeatedly cited in Israeli and international trade press as part of the company’s “Israeli-founded cyber unicorn” origin story, but this framing originates from third-party press rather than Snyk’s own “About” materials, which describe Tel Aviv as one of many standard global engineering hubs with no language framing Israel operations as a unique geopolitical partnership.⁸⁹¹⁰ Snyk appears in the Startup Nation Central “Startup Nation Finder” directory, a nonprofit that promotes Israeli tech internationally, but this is a directory listing rather than a confirmed sponsorship, funding, or governance relationship.⁵⁸ The only identified content-adjacent finding is that a Snyk-published npm package once incorporated a third-party dependency carrying anti-war “protestware” targeted at Russian installs, which Snyk later removed; a separate, unrelated pro-Palestine “protestware” package identified by researchers was not a Snyk product.⁵⁹

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

No public evidence identified of Snyk corporate lobbying, PAC filings, or donations to the IDF, FIDF, JNF/KKL, or Israeli settlement organizations. No public evidence identified of Snyk operations, dealerships, or subsidiary activity in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, or Israeli settlements, and the company does not appear in the OHCHR settlement-business database, the Special Rapporteur’s July 2025 report, or “No Tech for Apartheid” campaign materials (which focus on Google and Amazon’s Project Nimbus).^11341337 No employee walkout, petition, or disciplinary action concerning Israel-Palestine speech was identified. A 2023 industry roundup of corporate statements on the October 2023 Hamas attack does not list Snyk among catalogued companies.⁶⁰ Guy Podjarny’s appearance at a “Mind the Tech” industry event was in his capacity as founder of a different company (Tessl), not as a Snyk representative.

Named Entities and Evidence Map

BDS-1000 Score (V4)

• V_MAX: 5.36 Sum_OTHERS: 2.53
• BRS Score: 367 Tier: D (Moderate)

The Economic domain (Economic = 5.36) sets V_MAX and drives the overall score, reflecting Snyk’s documented operational Tel Aviv office, its two completed Israeli-startup acquisitions, and its founder-level financial ties to the Israeli tech ecosystem - the only domain where Impact, Magnitude, and Proximity factors all cluster at moderate-to-high levels (I=7.5, M=5.0, P=7.5). The Political domain contributes a secondary, much smaller uplift (Political = 2.47) from founder biography, funding-source framing, and the asymmetric Ukraine-versus-Gaza corporate response, while Military and Digital contribute almost nothing (0.01 and 0.05), reflecting the near-total absence of defence-sector or surveillance-technology evidence. The resulting BRS of 367 places Snyk in Tier D (Moderate) - a company with a documented, primarily commercial and reputational Israel nexus, not a military, surveillance, or settlement-infrastructure one. Scoring followed the standard BDS-1000 method: scale-free Impact × Magnitude/Proximity per domain, evidence-only inputs drawn exclusively from the four domain audits, and human vetting of the resulting V4 figures.

Methodology Note

• Every scored claim traces to one of the four domain audits (Military, Digital, Economic, Political); where those audits found nothing after documented search effort, this dossier states “No public evidence identified” rather than inferring a connection.
• Impact (I) reflects the type of activity documented (e.g., acquisition vs. contract vs. biography); Magnitude (M) reflects its scale (e.g., headcount, deal value, funding size); Proximity (P) reflects directness (corporate act vs. founder pre-history vs. acquired-company history).
• A temporal-mitigation rule applies: divested, exited, or discontinued operations - such as the reported June 2026 dissolution of Snyk’s Israel R&D centre - are treated as mitigating rather than aggravating factors, consistent with the dossier’s evidentiary standard.
• Entity attribution follows a no-transitive-guilt rule: pre-Snyk employment (e.g., Danny Grander at Gita Technologies) or acquired-company founder biography (e.g., Eli Cohen at Helios) is recorded as documented context, not treated as a Snyk corporate act.
• Where an activity would implicate both economic and political dimensions (e.g., a settlement-linked operation), the scoring framework dual-counts Economic and Political; no such dual-counted settlement operation was identified for Snyk.
• All figures in the V4 score table are fixed, human-vetted outputs and are reproduced here verbatim without alteration.

End Notes