Company overview. Centripetal Networks, Inc., now Centripetal Networks, LLC, is a privately held cybersecurity company founded in 2009 by brothers Steven and Jonathan Rogers. It is organized under Delaware law with headquarters in Reston, Virginia, and additional U.S. facilities in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, plus European operations in Galway, Ireland. Investors include Alsop Louie Partners and Nyca Partners. Third-party sources (Kona Equity) estimate roughly 70–80 employees and annual revenue around $15 million; a 2022 ITC filing stated a workforce of 80 across its two U.S. sites. It is not publicly traded and has no disclosed parent.
Products and operations. Centripetal is an operating company, not a patent-assertion entity. It pioneered the "Threat Intelligence Gateway" category and sells RuleGATE-branded intelligence-driven security gateways that underpin its CleanINTERNET managed security service, which applies threat-intelligence rules to block attacks at the network edge. Related offerings include QuickThreat and AI-Analyst. Its patents cover packet filtering, rule-set management, and selective decryption/inspection of encrypted traffic. Gartner named it a 2017 "Cool Vendor."
Litigation posture. In the tracked case data, Centripetal appears once, as defendant/patent owner in Keysight Technologies, Inc. v. Centripetal Networks, Inc., a PTAB inter partes review filed August 12, 2022 (IPR2022-01421, challenging U.S. Patent 10,681,009). As an operating company that sells products practicing its patents, Centripetal is also a frequent plaintiff outside this database — it has sued Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, and Keysight in district court and at the ITC — making it an active two-way litigant rather than a passive NPE.
Notable context. Centripetal's best-known case is Centripetal Networks, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc. (E.D. Va., filed 2018), where it won what was then the largest U.S. patent damages award (roughly $1.9B past damages, up to $3.2B with royalties). The Federal Circuit vacated that judgment in 2022 because the trial judge's wife owned Cisco stock, and on remand a new judge found no infringement of the remaining patents. Separately, Keysight has prevailed across multiple forums, including PTAB decisions invalidating numerous Centripetal claims.