Centripetal Networks

Centripetal Networks operates CleanINTERNET, an intelligence-led managed network security service that ingests threat intelligence from more than 60 sources and thousands of feeds and applies it directly at the network edge to block traffic matching known-bad indicators in real time, rather than surfacing alerts for analysts to triage after traffic has already passed through. The pitch is that most organizations already buy threat intelligence but rarely operationalize more than a fraction of it because doing so at network line-rate is a hard engineering problem.

Founded in 2009 in Reston, Virginia by Steven Rogers, Centripetal built and patented technology for high-speed threat intelligence enforcement — patents significant enough that the company sued Cisco for infringement in 2018. That case produced a $2.75 billion jury verdict in 2020, the largest patent damages award in U.S. history at the time, which was later vacated on appeal because the presiding judge’s spouse held Cisco stock. On retrial, a different judge found Cisco did not infringe, and the Supreme Court declined to hear Centripetal’s subsequent appeal. The company won a Global InfoSec Award at RSA Conference 2024 and has more recently rebranded around centripetal.ai, signaling a push toward AI-driven threat-intelligence operationalization.

The litigation history is genuinely double-edged as evidence: a $2.75 billion verdict, even one later vacated on procedural grounds, indicates a court once considered the underlying patents highly valuable, but the ultimate retrial outcome went against Centripetal on the merits. Combined with CleanINTERNET’s real differentiator — enforcement at the edge rather than post-hoc detection — Centripetal is best read as a durable, technically serious network security vendor whose IP story is more complicated than a simple win or loss.