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FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia has led the company since it bought Mandiant, a firm he founded.
- Cybersecurity company FireEye has brought on Goldman Sachs to advise the public company on a possible sale, sources tell Business Insider.
- Private equity firms are the most likely buyers after the company failed to gain the interest of strategic acquirers in an earlier process, the sources said.
- The company has struggled since going public in 2013 and is currently losing money.
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Cybersecurity firm FireEye is considering a sale, sources tell Business Insider, roughly six years after the company went public.
Goldman Sachs has been brought on to advise the company on a possible deal, and private equity firms appear to be the most likely buyer, three sources familiar with the discussions said. The sources said that talks are in early stages and there is no certainty a deal will be reached.
Representatives for FireEye and Goldman declined to comment.
Milpitas, Calif.-based FireEye, which has a market cap of just under $3 billion, has struggled to grow its original business that founder Ashar Aziz created. Aziz, who left the company in 2016, filed more than 150 patents on the different software and hard drives the firm used to anticipate potential cybersecurity threats.
The firm however has not been able to turn a profit, losing more than $67 million in the second quarter of this year.
FireEye's share price traded as high as $81 a share in the spring of 2014 after several acquisitions, including a $1 billion purchase of Mandiant, a company that was founded by FireEye's current CEO Kevin Mandia. Just months later though, the stock price fell by roughly 70%, and has since fallen further. The company currently trades at just over $13 a share.
Mandia took over in mid-2016 with the goal of transitioning the firm's business away from its hardbox-sales-focused model to a software-as-a-service structure. The change helped the firm turn a profit in the fourth quarter of 2017, thanks to a jump in subscription revenue, but increased competition in the space and growing costs have pushed margins back into the red.
The company pursued a sales process with Morgan Stanley in 2016, according to Bloomberg, and rejected two takeover offers from companies including Symantec.
