FireEye Emerges From Stealth

MENLO PARK, Calif. -- FireEye, Inc., a pioneer in the burgeoning Network Access Control (NAC) market, today announced its entry into the space with patent-pending virtual machine technology to provide the most accurate and easy-to-deploy internal network security solution. Founded by the former CTO of Sun Microsystems' N1 products, Ashar Aziz, and headed by security industry veterans from Cisco, McAfee, and Symantec, FireEye has closed a Series A round of funding of $6.45 million led by Norwest Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. The company's first product, expected in the summer of 2006, leverages virtual machines within a network appliance to examine the impact of suspicious network traffic in an instrumented virtual environment.

"FireEye has developed a genuinely transformational technology that plays into an enormous market opportunity," said Promod Haque, managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners. "Strong positive reaction from customers, coupled with increasing business pressure to protect against zero-day attacks, worms, and network-borne malware, were key factors in driving the current funding round."

According to a recent report by Infonetics Research, a leading international market research and consulting firm, Network Access Control (NAC) is the "Holy Grail" of network security. Infonetics projects the NAC market will grow from $323 million in 2005 to $3.9 billion in 2008, driven primarily by increasing desire to protect against internal malware infections.

"The ability to monitor for anomalous traffic and the ability to quickly contain this traffic are important aspects of a post-connect network access control process," said Lawrence Orans, security analyst for Gartner. "The challenge is finding the right match for your environment with a solution that provides high levels of coverage without excessive quarantines or false positives."

FireEye Inc.