Company overview
VeriSign, Inc. (commonly "Verisign"; NASDAQ: VRSN) is a publicly traded U.S. internet-infrastructure company headquartered in Reston, Virginia, incorporated in 1995 by D. James Bidzos, who remains CEO/executive chairman. It is a pure-play public company with no parent. Headcount is small and stable at roughly 925–935 employees, and trailing-twelve-month revenue was about $1.7 billion as of mid-2026 (FY2025 revenue ~$1.66 billion); market capitalization has recently run in the $21–25 billion range. Sources: Verisign corporate site/10-K summaries, MarketWatch, PitchBook, Yahoo Finance.
Products / services / operations
Verisign is a registry operator, not a registrar or carrier. It maintains the authoritative registry for the .com and .net generic top-level domains (plus .name and the country-code .cc), operates back-end registry systems for .edu and certain other gTLDs, serves as root zone maintainer, and operates two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers. It also markets managed DNS and DDoS-mitigation services and publishes cyber-threat/domain-abuse reporting. Earlier in its history Verisign ran a large communications and security-services portfolio (SSL certificates, and prepaid wireless/messaging platforms for carriers) before divesting those businesses.
Patent-litigation posture
With 2 tracked cases as defendant and 0 as plaintiff, Verisign is an operating company being sued, not an NPE. Both tracked entries are the same matter, Freedom Wireless, Inc. v. Alltel Corp. et al., filed 2006-11-30 in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division (No. 2:06-cv-00504) — a notably plaintiff-friendly patent venue. The suits targeted Verisign for prepaid-wireless services it supplied to carriers rather than its registry business.
Notable cases and context
Freedom Wireless, a small Phoenix patent holder, asserted prepaid cellular patents (U.S. 6,157,823; 5,825,867; 5,884,851). Verisign was named as co-defendant with Alltel, Comverse, U.S. Cellular and others. The case settled in May 2008: Verisign paid an undisclosed sum and transferred to Freedom Wireless a portfolio of roughly 10 U.S. and 12 foreign patents relating to prepaid wireless service, while taking a limited license back. This was a mid-2000s wave of prepaid-wireless patent litigation; Freedom Wireless had earlier won an $87 million settlement against Boston Communications Group.