Cisco

Cisco was founded in 1984 by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, two Stanford University staff members, and listed on Nasdaq in 1990. It is headquartered in San Jose, California, and is part of the S&P 500.

It builds the networks much of the internet runs on: routers, switches and wireless gear such as Catalyst, Nexus and Meraki, silicon like Silicon One, and the infrastructure for AI data centres. On top of the network it sells security (Duo, Secure Firewall and the Talos threat research team), observability with Splunk and ThousandEyes, and Webex for meetings and calling.

According to its annual report for fiscal 2026, Cisco had about 82,400 employees on July 25, 2026. Its largest engineering sites are in San Jose, Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, Bengaluru and Ottawa, with further development centres in Kraków, Harpenden, Hangzhou, Lysaker near Oslo and Rolle, among others.