The company was founded in 1999, and it was acquired in 2019 as part of Perforce's acquisition of Zend's parent, Rogue Wave Software.

[citation needed] In 1997, Gutmans and Suraski rewrote the parser of PHP-FI, originally written by Lerdorf, resulting in PHP 3.

[4] In February 2009, Zend's co-founder Andi Gutmans was appointed as CEO, after serving as the company's VP of research and development.

[5] Zend also recruited Mark Burton, who had served as EVP of worldwide sales at MySQL, as executive chairman.

[1] In April, Perforce's Zend Framework was spun off as a separate project to the Linux Foundation, and was renamed Laminas.

[10] The company also develops a Zend Server Community Edition, supporting Linux, Windows, iSeries i5/OS, and Mac OS X, and available as a paid upgrade.

Zend Guard was a tool to protect PHP 4 and 5 source code from being viewed, copied or modified.