SUNNYVALE, Calif., July 26, 2005 - Fortinet - the pioneer and market leader of Unified Threat Management and only provider of ASIC-accelerated, network-based antivirus firewall systems for real-time network protection -- today announced the company has been named a Top Ten Private Company, rising to the number three slot, by Light Reading, an online news and research site covering the networking and telecommunications industries. For its Top Ten Private Company list, Light Reading selects private companies that excel in the areas of financial stability, management experience, and carrier-class technology.

Fortinet's second recognition in Light Reading's Top Ten Private Company list during 2005 reaffirms Fortinet's strength in three key areas:

• Financial Stability - Fortinet grew its 2004 revenues more than 100 percent year-over-year and has raised significant capital to continue aggressive growth - closing a $50 million mezzanine financing in March 2004 on top of a $30 million financing in August 2003 for a total of $93 million of venture capital funding since the company was founded in 2000.
• Management Experience - Fortinet has a strong and seasoned management team, led by the Founder and former CEO of NetScreen Ken Xie and the former CFO of Adobe Hal Covert. The senior management team at Fortinet also includes veterans of rapidly growing businesses including Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Check Point, 3Com, Solectron, Apple and Broadcom.
• Products - Nearly 100,000 Fortinet FortiGate™ systems have now shipped to thousands of customers worldwide, demonstrating the significant and growing momentum for the company's ASIC-accelerated enterprise security appliances that offer blended threat protection. Last year, Fortinet announced the industry's first ATCA-based FortiGate-5000 chassis family of security systems for large enterprises, telecommunication carriers and managed security service providers (MSSPs), which have been gaining traction in these markets.

"We are pleased that Light Reading has recognized Fortinet as a Top Ten Private Company, for the second consecutive time, based on our continued track record of successful business execution and customer innovation in the network security industry," said Ken Xie, founder, president and CEO of Fortinet. "This award is a strong testament to Fortinet's continued business growth, enterprise and carrier-class security technology and the momentum of Fortinet's blended threat protection approach that is provisioned to thousands of network security customers worldwide."

Light Reading's latest Top Ten Private Company list can be viewed at:
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=77579&table_number=1&page_number=&site=

A new Fortinet profile on Light Reading can be viewed at:
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=77617&WT.svl=topten_0