Nearly 27 years ago, in June 1999, a 3-year-old Seattle-based internet traffic-management company called F5 Networks Inc. went public on the Nasdaq, boasting customers such as PSINet, MCI WorldCom, StarMedia Network, Vanstar, Frontier GlobalCenter, and BellSouth.net.
Don’t recognize the names? That’s because they no longer exist. Each ended up bankrupt, acquired, or both within a few years, mostly as casualties of the dot-com crash.
F5 was far from a sure thing itself. The company, with 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 a sign of how speculative the late-1990s internet boom had become, with unprofitable companies going public based on sales to other companies that had yet to prove their own business models.
But F5 has outlived most of the customers in its IPO prospectus and the three investment banks that took it public. The former Seattle startup this morning marked its 30th year in business by ringing the opening bell on the Nasdaq in New York City.
“We have evolved from a load balancing startup into a global leader that delivers and secures every app and API anywhere,” F5 CEO François Locoh-Donou said at the Nasdaq podium.
F5 has survived over the years by adapting its business from the early internet to data centers and now the cloud and artificial intelligence — while weathering the dot-com crash, a wave of competitive and economic threats, and more recently, a cybersecurity incident of its own.
Along the way, F5 has evolved from hardware appliances to software and back again, with hardware sales now surging again on demand from AI data centers.
The company has a market value of $21.9 billion, with revenue 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 globally and counts more than 80% of the Fortune 500 among its customers.
In an investor presentation in New York on Thursday, F5 said it expects upper-single-digit annual revenue growth through fiscal 2029, with AI as a big driver. F5 projects its addressable market will grow from about $15 billion this year to more than $40 billion by 2030, citing new opportunities in load balancing for AI data centers, AI data delivery, and security for AI apps.
One constant from those early years is the ticker symbol, FFIV. Shares were up about a half-percent in early trading today after the company rang the opening bell.
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