Company Info

In the Beginning Was the Electronic Dictionary

The company was born from an idea to create a dictionary software. The idea occurred to David Yang, currently the chairman of ABBYY's board of directors, 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.

1989 - David Yang founded BIT Software (the name of ABBYY before 1997).

1990 - The first version of ABBYY Lingvo offered translation of words and phrases from Russian to English and back.

First Steps in Document Capture Space

ABBYY expands its research and development efforts into text recognition space that resulted in creating first omnifont OCR system in Russia, implementing large government project of hand-printed forms processing, and licensing its own high-quality technologies to third parties.

1993 - The first omnifont system in Russia, ABBYY FineReader document conversion application, is launched.

1995 - ABBYY Ukraine representative office was established.

1996 - Licensing OCR and linguistic technologies to Siemens Nixdorf.

1996 - Licensing FineReader source code to Samsung Electronics.

1996 - First form processing project with ICR support implemented for the Russian Pension Fund.

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