Company History

In the Beginning Was the Dictionary

ABBYY (before 1997 — BIT Software) was founded in 1989 by David Yang, currently the chairman of ABBYY's board of directors. The company was born from an idea to create a dictionary software. This idea occured to David during a French lesson when he was a student of Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. While looking up words in a bulky dictionary he imagined an easy-to-use tool that would allow people to translate words in just a few seconds. This dictionary application later became the first ABBYY product named Lingvo.

The first version of ABBYY Lingvo (released in July 1990) offered translation of words and phrases from Russian to English and back. Further enhanced versions followed, and in time, other product lines were introduced, including widely known ABBYY FineReader document conversion application (July 1993), ABBYY FormReader system for data capture, software development tools, etc.

ABBYY Comes to the World

A few years after the launch of ABBYY FineReader, the company realized that quality and accuracy of this product had exceeded the quality of the alternatives not only in Russia but also abroad. As a result, in 1997 ABBYY began to expand its business in the global market building up an international distribution network and establishing partnerships with the world’s leading equipment manufacturers to bundle FineReader with modern scanning devices.

Since 2004, along with further expansion to new markets, ABBYY has spent considerable effort on streamlining its business processes and diversifying its product portfolio. For example, the company strengthened its focus on developing “technology” products – software development kits (SDK) and enterprise solutions. This brought ABBYY to a leading position on enterprise content management (ECM) and document management markets as a provider of high-quality optical character recognition (OCR), data capture and form processing solutions.

The Company Today

Today, ABBYY is an international company with 9 offices in different countries including Russia, Germany, the United States, Ukraine, the UK, Cyprus, Japan and Taiwan. ABBYY products are now being sold in more than 130 countries around the world through a network of regional and international partners.

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