firewall
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The Firewall Company That Bet Everything on the Middle
For 30 years, WatchGuard has sold security to the companies too small for Palo Alto and too serious to go without - and built its whole business around the partners who install it.
Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks is a global cybersecurity company that helps organizations prevent, detect and respond to cyber threats across networks, clouds, endpoints and identities. Founded in 2005 by Nir Zuk, it pioneered the next-generation firewall and has since expanded into an integrated security platform spanning network security (Strata), cloud security (Prisma), and AI-driven security operations (Cortex). Serving roughly 70,000 organizations in more than 150 countries, including most of the Fortune 100, it is one of the largest pure-play cybersecurity vendors in the world.
Fortinet
Fortinet is a global cybersecurity company founded in 2000 by brothers Ken and Michael Xie. Best known for its FortiGate firewalls and purpose-built security ASICs, Fortinet converges networking and security into a single platform - the Fortinet Security Fabric - powered by the FortiOS operating system. It serves enterprises, service providers, and governments in more than 100 countries, and in 2025 reported $6.8 billion in revenue.
Check Point Software Technologies
Check Point Software Technologies is an Israeli cybersecurity company founded in 1993 that pioneered the modern firewall with its stateful inspection technology. Today it runs the Infinity platform - a unified, AI-powered security architecture spanning network (Quantum), cloud (CloudGuard), and workspace (Harmony) - protecting more than 100,000 organizations across roughly 60 countries. Publicly traded on NASDAQ as CHKP, it reported about $2.73 billion in 2025 revenue.
Unplugged
Unplugged is a privacy-first technology company behind the UP Phone, a de-Googled smartphone running its own UnpluggedOS - an Android fork stripped of Google Mobile Services. Built around an on-device firewall, a no-logs VPN, encrypted storage, and a hardware battery-disconnect switch, the phone is designed for people who want to keep using a modern smartphone without feeding the surveillance economy. The company sells direct-to-consumer and through Best Buy, and says it earns no revenue from customer data.