The LPGA’s Founders Cup is relatively young in the grand scheme of the tour’s 75-year history. But, as the name suggests, it’s a tournament that honors the 13 determined women who founded the tour and represents the heart and soul of their legacy.
When it launched in 2011 with a mock purse – in other words, players didn’t get paid, all the money went to charity – three of the tour’s 13 founders were on hand that week to watch Karrie Webb triumph in Arizona.
Marlene Hagge Vossler was the last survivor of the band of 13. She died in May 2023 at age 89.
Keeping the Founders Cup alive and thriving is somewhat of a modern barometer of the tour’s health. The event has undergone a series of changes over the years, moving from Arizona to the East Coast and shifting up and back on the calendar. In 2024, the Founders Cup suffered a major blow when Cognizant pulled out as title sponsor. The event rolled on in 2025 with the LPGA propping up much of the proceedings.
But now, the Founders Cup is back on solid ground, thanks, in part, to the connections of new LPGA commissioner Craig Kessler.
On Tuesday, the tour announced Fortinet as the new title sponsor of the Founders Cup in a multiyear deal. The revamped event will take place March 19-22, 2026, at the recently renovated Sharon Heights Golf and Country Club in Menlo Park, California. The purse will be $3 million, up from $2 million in 2025.
“… everybody who said they would be here to help if I took the job, they’re actually showing up to help,” Kessler told Golfweek.
The connection started with Aaron Grant, the general manager of Sharon Heights, who said “whatever we can do to help” after Kessler got the job.
“He called back with a much bigger opportunity than I had originally been thinking about,” said Grant, a father of three young girls and strong supporter of the women’s tour.
Grant reached out to the team at Fortinet – a global cybersecurity firm based in Sunnyvale, California – to gauge their interest, knowing of the company’s commitment to golf, particularly in the Bay Area.
“They were effusive right off the bat,” said Grant.
The deal was cemented with Kessler and the Xie brothers – Fortient co-founders Ken and Michael – over a round of golf with Grant at Sharon Heights. The Xie family took things a step further by making a sizable personal donation to the LPGA Foundation. Since the beginning, the LPGA-USGA Girls Golf Program has been the primary beneficiary of the Founders event, raising millions to fuel the next generation.
Recognized by Forbes as one of the most trusted companies in America, Fortinet title-sponsored an event on the PGA Tour in Napa from 2021 to 2023 and currently sponsors the Fortinet Cup with the PGA Tour Americas. The company also partners with the DP World Tour and sponsors the AJGA’s Fortinet Stanford Invitational hosted by Rose Zhang.
“Fortinet is honored to join the LPGA as title sponsor of the Fortinet Founders Cup, a tournament that celebrates the vision and perseverance of the LPGA’s 13 trailblazing founders,” Ken Xie, Founder, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Fortinet said in a release.
“Our own journey began in Silicon Valley nearly 25 years ago with a commitment to innovation and putting our customers first, values that continue to drive us today. Together with the LPGA, we aim to further advance the game of golf and inspire future generations and champion opportunities for women on and off the course.”
Returning the LPGA to Northern California was high on Kessler’s to-do list. The tour hasn’t had a regular stop there since 2022.
“Some of the world’s best golf is in Northern California,” said Kessler. “There’s a population of supporters who absolutely love the game, including on the women’s side, and are doing a lot to support it. You know, we’re a stone’s throw away from Stanford University, which the energy around Stanford is incredible, not just when it comes to golf, but in terms of raising some of the brightest minds in the world, and when folks come out to the Fortinet Founders Cup at Sharon Heights, they are going to feel an energy there that’s quite special. And hopefully will become contagious.”
Grant began his stint at Sharon Heights – which tips at around 7,000 yards – on the last day of demolition in 2023 and said a total of 330 redwoods were pulled out, opening up the tree-lined course, and replaced with native species.
There wasn’t a single redwood on property when the course was originally designed in 1962 by Jack Fleming, a protégé of Alister MacKenzie. Over the years, Grant noted, the membership had planted around 2,000 of them.
The Menlo Park staple features MacKenzie bunkers, flowing fairways and 18 unique greens. Grant calls the openness of the place now “stunningly beautiful.” Renovations were carried out by architect Todd Eckenrode and Origins Golf Design, and the course reopened in 2024.
The 2025 Founders Cup, won by Yealimi Noh, was held at Bradenton Country Club in early February. Kessler plans to give players a first look at the schedule for 2026 at a player meeting this week during the FM Championship outside Boston.
“I think what the players will find is significant progress on kind of routing optimization in the first half of the year as we go into ‘26,” said Kessler, “but by no means are we all the way to perfect. It’s going to take us a little while before we get there.”
