When war came to Israel on Oct 7, 2023, JFrog’s India engineers did more than keep the lights on. They stepped into customer meetings for colleagues in bunkers, backed up teams hit by military call-ups, and helped the Israeli software company run during the worst conflict the country had seen in decades.For Shlomi Ben Haim, JFrog’s co-founder and CEO, that moment turned a business continuity plan from theory into proof. “In the world of a CEO, to run a company during a war is not an experience that you are inviting. But when it happens, you learn who your people are, how strong the culture is, and how aligned it is with the strategy,” he said, adding that in 2025, they had their best performance ever since the company was founded in 2008.JFrog had built an India operation well before the war, but the crisis showed what that investment meant. India was not just an offshore base. It was a full operating centre capable of supporting Asia-Pacific, North America and Europe.JFrog had about 1,000 employees in Israel, and “around 15% of them were called by the army to be reservists,” Ben Haim said. In India, it had more than 300 in India. In the middle of war, those India teams became a shock absorber for the company’s business.
We met Ben Haim before Israel’s war with Iran started in Feb. Our guess is, the India operation has become even more critical now.JFrog has become hugely important in the software development lifecycle – the world’s biggest banks, retailers and automotive companies use it. Its platform acts like a secure, organised warehouse for software. Imagine a team of chefs (developers) cooking a massive banquet (software).
They need thousands of ingredients (code, libraries, dependencies) from different suppliers, and they need to store the finished dishes (binaries) before serving them.
JFrog stores these binaries, which are composed of 0s and 1s and are the final, executable applications that machines can read, just like GitHub stores source codes, which are text-based and human-readable and which when compiled become binaries.
JFrog also secures binaries, scans them and helps companies move them into production. It is therefore today a system of record for binaries, the definitive repository that guarantees which version of a binary is current, approved, and safe to use in production.Ai Model Is A BinaryWith AI, JFrog saw a massive new opportunity. “An AI model is yet another binary, another software package,” Ben Haim said.First it built native support for the emerging AI stack, especially Hugging Face, the hub for models, so that enterprises could integrate Hugging Face models into their existing software development workflows.
It added security on top, as also model scanning, model protection, and model delivery. The result, Ben Haim said, is that “all the AI model lifecycle is managed in our platform.”So, JFrog today sees itself as infrastructure for the AI age. And that gives it strategic weight as AI explodes. “There is a tsunami coming,” Ben Haim said, pointing to millions of new models being created every week. Agentic AI adds another twist.
Software is no longer written only by humans. “There is a new persona in the field that I have to support, which are not human beings,” he said. Agents generate code too, and they still need a system of record.The customer response, he said, is urgent and top-down. Earlier waves of software change often started with developers and spread upward. AI is different. “What we see now is enterprises understand that there is a race and they cannot wait,” he said.
“Every board meeting, including in JFrog will start with what are we doing with AI?” Legal, HR, ERP, CRM, cost, timing, headcount. Everything is now being viewed through that lens.Yet adoption is not frictionless. Ben Haim said customers worry about two things. The first is cost predictability. AI workloads can create compute and cloud bills that are hard to forecast. The second is model security. “We don’t trust it yet,” he said of what many CIOs and CISOs tell him.
They worry about compliance, malicious packages, vulnerabilities and intellectual property violations.That gives JFrog another opening. Security, Ben Haim said, is now the company’s biggest growth engine.But more recently, concerns have grown about how this security business will be impacted by the emergence of agentic code security tools like those of Anthropic, which can scan, find, and patch code vulnerabilities in real-time. We’ll have to wait to see how this goes. And how JFrog responds.
