How it started
History
FireEye was founded in 2004 by Ashar Aziz, a former Sun Microsystems engineer. FireEye's first commercial product was developed and sold in 2010. Initially, FireEye focused on developing virtual machines to download and test internet traffic before transferring it to a corporate or government network.
In December 2012, founder Aziz stepped down as CEO and former McAfee CEO, David DeWalt, was appointed to the position to prepare the company for an initial public offering (IPO). The following year, FireEye raised an additional $50 million in venture capital, bringing its total funding to $85 million. In late 2013, FireEye went public, raising $300 million. FireEye remained public until 2021.
In December 2013, FireEye acquired Mandiant, an incident response services company, for $1 billion. Mandiant became a subsidiary of FireEye. After the Mandiant acquisition, FireEye was called in to investigate high-profile attacks against Target, JP Morgan Chase, Sony Pictures, Anthem, and others.
In 2010, FireEye expanded into the Middle East and the Asian Pacific. The company entered Europe in 2011 and Africa in 2013. Despite the expansions, FireEye was not profitable, due to high operating costs such as research and development expenses.
In late 2014, FireEye initiated a secondary offering, selling another $1.1 billion in shares, to fund the development of a wider range of products. Shortly afterward, FireEye acquired high-speed packet capture company, nPulse, for approximately $60 million. By 2015, FireEye made over $100 million in annual revenue, but was still unprofitable.
From Wikipedia’s article on FireEye, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2