Eggplant has been majority-owned by global investment firm The Carlyle Group since 2016.

Inverness-born Mackintosh founded Eggplant in the UK before establishing Eggplant’s US headquarters in Boulder, Colorado in 2010 and the company, which has a headcount of over 200, then expanded operations to Germany and Japan.

Keysight Technologies, which has a market capitalisation of $18.25 billion and posted revenue of $4.3bn in 2019, traces its roots back to Hewlett-Packard in South Queensferry in the 1970s, was subsequently spun-out of HP and continues to have an operating base in Edinburgh.

Utilising artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics, Eggplant’s Digital Automation Intelligence platform can test any technology on any device, operating system or browser at any layer, from the user interface (UI) to application programming interfaces (APIs). Since the onset of COVID-19, global demand for its services and products have accelerated along with those of Keysight.

A spokesman for Mackintosh said: “The pace of digitisation has only increased in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and Eggplant is one of many tech players to have benefited from this trend. George has founded and managed equity-backed technology companies for the last 28 years and is highly skilled in software, services and hardware sales to global businesses in Europe, North America and Asia.

“The combination of market vision and that level of expertise in sales is arguably at the heart of the success he has had to date. It will be interesting to see what George does next and there are certainly some interesting new ventures and projects in the pipeline.”