F5 Networks Inc
- Industry
- Networking Equipment
- Exchange
- US
- Country
- USA
- IPO date
- Jun 4, 1999
- Employees
- 6,512
- Website
- www.f5.com
Composite valuation range · conservative $200–$240 / fair $280–$340 / optimistic $400–$460. At $407.96, Within the optimistic intrinsic-value range · much expectation priced in.
At publication $388.15 (May 29, 2026)
Data from EODHD, shown in the reporting currency; for reference only, not investment advice.
F5, Inc. provides multicloud application security and delivery solutions in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia Pacific region. The company's distributed cloud services enable its customers to deploy, secure, and operate applications in any architecture, from on-premises to the public cloud. It also offers unified, security, networking, and application management solutions, such as web app and API protection; multi-cloud networking; application delivery and deployment; domain name system; content delivery network; and application deployment and orchestration. In addition, the company provides application security and delivery products, including NGINX Plus; NGINX One Console; NGINX Ingress Controller; WAF for NGINX; BIG-IP Packaged Software; and BIG-IP Systems. Further, it provides a range of professional services, including maintenance, consulting, training, and other technical support services. The company sells its products to large enterprise businesses, public sector institutions, governments, and service providers through distributors, value-added resellers, managed service providers, systems integrators, and other indirect channel partners. It has partnerships with public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. The company was formerly known as F5 Networks, Inc. and changed its name to F5, Inc. in November 2021. F5, Inc. was incorporated in 1996 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington.
History
F5, Inc. was incorporated in 1996 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and went public on June 4, 1999. Formerly known as F5 Networks, Inc., the company changed its name to F5, Inc. in November 2021. Its portfolio has expanded into three product families: F5 BIG-IP, F5 NGINX, and F5 Distributed Cloud Services, sold as hardware, software, and SaaS/managed services alongside maintenance, consulting, training, and support. On capital structure, F5 took on debt for acquisitions in 2020, prepaid all of its term loans in December 2022, and has since operated from a net-cash position. In fiscal 2025 it acquired CalypsoAI for $145.2 million in cash to add real-time threat defense, red-teaming, and data security to its ADSP offering, along with three smaller acquisitions. Revenue grew from $2.242 billion in fiscal 2019 to $3.088 billion in fiscal 2025, while diluted shares outstanding fell from about 61.10 million at the end of 2020 to 56.75 million by March 2026, and deferred revenue rose from roughly $1.49 billion in fiscal 2021 to about $2.119 billion by March 2026.
Industry position
F5 operates in the application security and delivery market, serving large enterprises, public-sector institutions, governments, and service providers across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific, with 44.2% of fiscal 2025 revenue coming from outside the Americas. Under Dell'Oro's 2025 market data, F5 ranked first globally in Overall Application Security and Delivery with a 22% share and first in ADC with a 42% share. Its closest ADC competitors are NetScaler/Citrix and A10 Networks, while in the broader application-security and cloud/edge arena it competes with Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly, Fortinet, Palo Alto, Cisco, Radware, and Thales/Imperva. The company sells through distributors, value-added resellers, managed service providers, and systems integrators under non-exclusive agreements, and maintains partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform; two global distributors accounted for 33.3% of fiscal 2025 revenue, while no single end customer exceeded 10%. Its competitive position rests on switching costs from products sitting in customers' production traffic paths with complex policy migration and high downtime risk, a large installed base, enterprise-grade reliability, and an established channel and delivery system, supported by an 81.4% GAAP gross margin in fiscal 2025; hardware platforms are outsourced to Flex, with assembly in Guadalajara, Mexico and Zhuhai, China.