The Story of Zenity: Building the Future of Citizen Development Security

Most cybersecurity startups begin with a technology in search of a problem. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ben Kliger revealed how Zenity started with a deeper insight: the future of enterprise development wouldn’t belong to professional developers at all.

From Military Innovation to Enterprise Security

Ben’s journey to founding Zenity was shaped by his early experiences in Unit 8200, Israel’s elite intelligence unit. “That was one of my life changing moments,” Ben reflects. “What’s very unique about unit 8200 is that at very early stage, you get to do pretty amazing stuff and lead very important initiatives that has direct impact on our country’s national security.”

This experience instilled two crucial principles that would later shape Zenity: the power of giving young people responsibility over critical systems, and the importance of constantly challenging established thinking. “We embrace challenging our mindset continuously,” Ben explains.

The Path to Entrepreneurship

Despite his eventual move into entrepreneurship, Ben’s journey wasn’t a straight line to founding Zenity. He gained valuable experience at companies like Deloitte, Microsoft, and Fort Scale. But entrepreneurship was always the end goal. “I grew up in a house of entrepreneurs,” Ben shares. “It was something that was clear to me that I want to do from a very young age.”

His time at Microsoft proved particularly influential, coinciding with the company’s transformation under Satya Nadella. “I was there when I saw firsthand the big change of culture, of execution that you brought all across the organization with, of course, the two leading aspects of empathy towards our colleagues, towards our peers, towards our customer, and being customer obsessed,” Ben recalls.

Identifying the Citizen Development Challenge

During his time at Microsoft, Ben witnessed firsthand the growing power of enterprise platforms. What started as simple productivity tools were evolving into full-fledged development platforms. This transformation created a new challenge: how to secure development when anyone could be a developer.

“Citizen Development today is a core strategy to make sure that organizations can really advance and continue to digitally transform their businesses,” Ben explains. “It’s about people building stuff on their own without waiting for it, or professional developers addressing their needs. It’s about using no code, drag and drop interfaces. It’s about using AI assistance or AI copilot to automate their processes to build external applications.”

Building Trust Through Enablement

Rather than approaching security as a restriction, Zenity reimagined it as an enabler of this inevitable shift. “How do you make sure that what these people are building were less tech savvy or of course less security savvy than traditional professional developers? How do you make sure that what they’re building is secure and is not exposing their respective organizations to risks?” Ben asks.

This approach resonated particularly well with large enterprises. “The ICP for us today, we target very large enterprises, I want to say a Fortune 1000 type of organizations who are relying heavily on major SaaS platforms such as Microsoft Salesforce or service now,” Ben shares.

The Vision Ahead

Looking to the future, Ben sees Zenity playing a crucial role in enabling the next wave of enterprise development. “It’s clear that sales were creating a new category,” he states. “We went to solve a problem that, first of all, huge. And with that, of course, there is a large opportunity to build something massive here, like a real company.”

The ambition is clear: “That’s the real goal for us, to go big and to be the next cyber security israeli success story. Building another checkpoint, as they say. That’s what we wanted it.”

For enterprise founders, Zenity’s story offers a powerful lesson: sometimes the biggest opportunities come not from creating new technologies, but from enabling inevitable transformations to happen safely and securely. As the line between developers and users continues to blur, Zenity’s approach to security as enablement might just become the new standard for enterprise software development.