WhereIsAtlas · Technology

What Happened to Linksys?

It started as DEW International in a Californian garage, became the default home Wi-Fi brand, and then changed hands four times. Most coverage stops at Foxconn — Fortinet actually owns it now.

Linksys went from a garage start-up called DEW International to the default name in home Wi-Fi, then passed through Cisco, Belkin, Foxconn and finally Fortinet — while its Linux-based WRT54G left a far bigger mark on the internet than its ownership history did.

The short answer

Linksys still exists and still sells routers — but it has not been an independent company for over two decades. It was bought by Cisco in 2003, sold to Belkin in 2013, and swept into Foxconn when Foxconn bought Belkin in 2018.

The part most coverage gets wrong: it is not a Foxconn brand today. In 2021 the cybersecurity firm Fortinet began buying into Linksys, and on 31 January 2025 it acquired the remaining preferred shares for $20.8 million, making Linksys wholly owned by Fortinet.

So the ownership chain runs: DEW International → Linksys → Cisco → Belkin → Foxconn → Fortinet. The brand outlived every owner's strategy for it — and the most famous thing it ever made was a $60 router that ran Linux.

A garage in Irvine

Linksys did not start as Linksys. It was founded in 1988 as DEW International, by Janie and Victor Tsao — a married couple who had emigrated from Taiwan and were working as consultants, matching American technology vendors with Taiwanese manufacturers.

They set up in the garage of their Irvine, California home, and their first products were distinctly unglamorous: printer sharers, devices that let several PCs share a single printer. The Tsaos ran the business part-time until 1992, when they went full time and moved into a proper office.

Growth came quickly once home computing took off. By 1994 the company had 55 employees and $6.5 million in annual revenue, selling Ethernet hubs, network cards and cables. Microsoft's Windows 95, with networking built in, widened the market dramatically in 1995 — and Linksys locked in US retail, first with Fry's Electronics that year and then Best Buy in 1996.

The router that built a movement

Linksys' breakout was the affordable multiport router in the late 1990s, which took a piece of corporate equipment and made it a home purchase. It shipped its first Wi-Fi router in 2001, and then in 2002 came the WRT54G.

The WRT54G was cheap, and — unusually for consumer hardware — it ran Linux. Within months hobbyists had cracked it open. The firmware projects that grew out of it, OpenWrt and DD-WRT, turned a $60 plastic box into a fully programmable platform, and in doing so taught a generation how networks actually work.

That is why the name endures. Linksys' corporate history is a chain of acquisitions; its cultural legacy is a router that people were allowed to reprogram.

Cisco buys in

In 2003 Cisco acquired Linksys in a deal reported at around $500 million. Linksys was a substantial business by then: 305 employees and more than $500 million in revenue. The logic was the connected home — Cisco wanted a consumer on-ramp to the internet it was busy building the backbone of.

It expanded the product line, buying VoIP maker Sipura Technology in 2005 and home networking software vendor Pure Networks in 2008. But consumer hardware was never really Cisco's business, and the strategic fit never fully materialised.

Passed along: Belkin, then Foxconn

In January 2013 Cisco announced it would sell its home networking division — Linksys included — to Belkin. The deal closed that March, and Belkin kept the brand, the products and the support channels. It also handed Belkin roughly 30% of the home router market overnight.

Five years later Linksys changed hands again, this time without its name in the headline. In 2018 Foxconn, the Taiwanese firm that is the world's largest electronics manufacturing services provider, bought Belkin and its subsidiaries — Linksys among them — for $866 million.

Through those years the product line kept moving: the Velop mesh system in 2017, Linksys Aware in 2019 (using Wi-Fi signals as a motion sensor), Linksys Shield parental controls in 2020, and Wi-Fi 6E systems from 2021.

The owner most people miss: Fortinet

In 2021 Linksys stopped being a pure consumer-networking story. Fortinet — a cybersecurity company — invested $75 million in Linksys preferred stock, then added a further $85 million. The stated focus was the security of home networks used for remote work.

That interest turned into ownership. On 31 January 2025 Fortinet acquired the remaining Series A Preferred Stock for $20.8 million, making Linksys wholly owned. Its flagship home product is now HomeWRK, a mesh router that separates personal and work traffic and runs Fortinet's security stack on the device.

Linksys also kept expanding physically, opening a development centre in Taipei and a sales and marketing centre in Amstelveen in the Netherlands in 2023.

Where is Linksys now?

Linksys is alive, shipping mesh systems and routers, and headquartered in Irvine — the same city where it began in a garage. But it is a brand inside a security company, not an independent maker, and it has been someone else's asset since 2003.

Its story is a useful one for anyone asking who owns a brand they remember: the visible logo can stay identical for decades while the company behind it changes hands four times. And its real legacy is not the acquisition chain at all — it is that a cheap, open, reprogrammable router helped create the open-source firmware scene.

Frequently asked questions

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Sources

1. The Linksys story — Linksys (2026-09-10)
2. Linksys - Wikipedia — Wikipedia (2026-09-10)
3. Cisco to buy Linksys for $500 million — The New York Times (2026-09-10)
4. Linksys brand name survives as Belkin takes over from Cisco — PCWorld (2026-09-10)
5. Belkin to acquire Linksys from Cisco — The Verge (2026-09-10)
6. Fortinet eyes bigger stake in Foxconn's Linksys with $85 million deal — MarketScreener / MT Newswires (2026-09-10)
7. Company profile: Linksys — The Company Check (2026-09-10)