AgileBits was founded by David Teare and Roustem Karimov in 2006. At the time, David and Roustem were working at a large multinational charity. They both wanted to escape the corporate world and set up on their own, so they went out and bought Apple Powerbook G4s, and starting planning the future!

Our day job was Java, and Java didn’t run very well, at the time anyways, it didn’t run very well at all on Macs. It was at least twice as slow. And so we had a choice there. We could either find a new job or switch back to PCs, and we liked our Macs so much so we decided we just wanted new jobs. And so that’s kind of how we got started. We went out on our own and played with a lot of things. And eventually we tripped over the idea of 1Password.

The company was then known as Agile Web Solutions, and existed to offer innovative web products for businesses. Version 0.1 of 1Password came about as an internal tool to manage password and form information for in-house tools and client sites, but it soon became apparent that the need and desire for their ‘home-baked’ tool was what people wanted, and so the team set all their efforts on creating the best and most secure password management tool ever made.

The running joke is that it was a one month project. Because we were actually doing a lot of website design back then, a lot of Ruby on Rails, and we were doing a lot of testing. We were constantly filling out all the forms. You constantly had to fill out, like a good credit card form, a bad credit card form, all these different scenarios. We thought: wouldn’t it be nice if we could just save these forms and then when it comes time to fill it, we just click a button and we’re there. So, the original name of 1Password was OS X Form, at osxform.com, so we would allow you to save all the forms and everything. And then we thought, know what? We might as well allow you to save passwords while you’re there. It’s technically a form field, so you might as well save it. Right?

10 Years Of 💪

Skip forward ten years and 1Password is now trusted and loved by millions of people and businesses across the globe. The product has gone from being Mac only to having versions available for Mac, PC, Android and iOS as well as a great web interface too. We have gone from a single standalone product, to solutions available for Individuals, families, and teams. Each app has seen countless thousands of new features added and 1Password is now the most secure and easy to use password security suite ever created.