Michael Xie co-founded Fortinet in 2000 alongside Ken Xie. He is the company president and chief technology officer. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Manitoba. Bloomberg described him as Chinese-born in 2019.
Fortinet started life as Appligation, Inc., later called ApSecure. The first product, the FortiGate firewall, was released in 2002. FortiGuard Labs followed in 2005.
The company raised about $13M in private funding from 2000 to early 2003. It posted its first profitable quarter in the third quarter of 2008.
Fortinet listed on Nasdaq in November 2009. The IPO raised $156M by the end of its first trading day. In 2016 the company introduced the Security Fabric.