About 27 years ago, in June 1999, a 3-year-old Seattle-based Internet-controlled company called F5 Networks Inc. went public on the Nasdaq, boasting clients such as PSINet, MCI WorldCom, StarMedia Network, Vanstar, Frontier GlobalCenter, and BellSouth.net.
Don’t know the words? That’s because they don’t exist anymore. Each ended up bankrupt, acquired, or both within a few years, mostly as casualties of the dot-com crash.
The F5 was far from a sure thing in itself. The company, which had 123 employees at the time, reported an annual loss of $3.7 million on revenue of $4.9 million in its IPO filing. It was emblematic of the speculative nature of the Internet in the late 1990s, when for-profit companies went public based on the sales of other companies that had yet to prove their business models.
But F5 outlived many of the clients in its IPO prospectus and the three investment banks that took it public. The Seattle startup this morning marked its 30th year in business by ringing the opening bell on the Nasdaq in New York City.
“We’ve gone from a load balancing startup to a global leader that delivers and secures all applications and APIs anywhere,” F5 CEO François Locoh-Donou said on the Nasdaq stage.
F5 has survived over the years by transforming its business from the early Internet to data centers and now the cloud and artificial intelligence – while facing the dot-com crash, a wave of competitive and economic threats, and most recently, its own cybersecurity incident.
Along the way, F5 has transitioned from hardware to software and back again, as hardware sales are now picking up again with demand for AI data centers.
The company has a market value of $21.9 billion, with revenues of $3.1 billion and profits of $692 million in its most recent fiscal year. Based in downtown Seattle’s F5 Tower, it employs 6,578 people worldwide and counts more than 80% of the Fortune 500 among its clients.
In an investor presentation in New York on Thursday, F5 said it expects single-digit annual revenue growth in fiscal 2029, with AI as a key driver. F5 projects its addressable market will grow from $15 billion this year to more than $40 billion by 2030, implying new opportunities for load balancing of AI data centers, AI data delivery, and AI application security.
One constant from those early years is the ticker symbol, FFIV. Shares rose nearly half a percent in early trading today after the company rang the opening bell.
