Intuit Inc.
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Intuit Inc.
Compare market positioning with top industry peers
Explore Intuit
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Company History
Founded 1983 in Mountain View, California, United States
Intuit was founded in 1983 in Mountain View, California, United States by Scott Cook and Tom Proulx, making it 43 years old.
In 1983, Scott Cook was sitting at his kitchen table watching his wife struggle for hours to balance their family checkbook using paper and a calculator. He realized it was a miserable, high-anxiety task that every single family in America hated doing. He tracked down an effective programmer at Stanford University, Tom Proulx, and asked him to write a simple software program that acted exactly like a physical checkbook on a computer screen. They called it 'Quicken', fundamentally launching the entire personal financial software industry.
Scott Cook is an absolutely visionary American billionaire and the profoundly influential founding architect fundamentally responsible for building the massive Intuit financial software empire. Operating as a fiercely observant consumer marketing executive at Procter & Gamble, Cook aggressively recognized the massive, agonizing frustration families experienced while manually balancing checkbooks. In 1983, he relentlessly partnered with a brilliant Stanford student, Tom Proulx, to completely revolutionize personal finance by launching Quicken. Defying massive early skepticism and incredibly intense market competition, Cook fiercely applied incredibly rigorous consumer-focused design principles to software engineering. His absolutely brilliant corporate leadership completely drove the aggressive expansion into massive products like TurboTax and QuickBooks, permanently establishing Intuit as an absolute multi-billion dollar monopoly in global financial technology.
Tom Proulx is a highly brilliant American software engineer and the profoundly influential technical co-founder fundamentally responsible for programming the absolute structural bedrock of the massive Intuit software empire. Operating as an incredibly talented undergraduate student at Stanford University in 1983, Proulx aggressively collaborated with Scott Cook to completely architect the incredibly complex original codebase for Quicken. By relentlessly translating Cook's massive consumer vision into a highly elegant, completely user-friendly software application, Proulx fiercely revolutionized the absolute standard for personal financial computing. His incredibly rigorous technical execution and absolutely massive dedication to frictionless UI design completely enabled the software to aggressively dominate the highly competitive early PC market, permanently securing his legacy as a foundational titan of Silicon Valley software engineering.
Scott Cook and Tom Proulx officially launch the innovative startup, transforming personal finance with Quicken.
Intuit launches QuickBooks, disrupting small business accounting and utterly dominating the US market.
Intuit executes an effective, historic acquisition of TurboTax, establishing its monopoly over consumer tax prep.
Intuit acquired GALT Technologies in 1996.
Intuit acquired Computing Resources Inc. of Reno in March 1999 for $200 million.
Intuit acquired Rock Financial in December 1999.
then-CEO Brad Smith forces the company to transition from legacy desktop software to lucrative recurring cloud SaaS.
Intuit acquires the email marketing leader for $12 billion, capturing the top-of-funnel small business ecosystem.
In a strategic, aggressive maneuver explicitly designed to transcend the seasonal, cyclical nature of annual tax preparation, Intuit executed a multi-billion dollar buyout of Credit Karma, a dominant consumer credit monitoring platform.
attempting to monopolize the entire operational lifecycle of American small businesses, Intuit executed its largest, acquisition in corporate history, buying the dominant email marketing leader Mailchimp.
To dominate the complex, frustrating world of consumer tax preparation, Intuit executed a key, historic acquisition of Chipsoft, the original innovative creator of TurboTax.
Key milestones include founding in Palo Alto (1983), launching Quicken (1984), landmark NASDAQ IPO (1993), acquiring Chipsoft/TurboTax (1993), surviving DOJ-blocked Microsoft merger (1995), pivoting to QuickBooks Online cloud SaaS (2010s), acquiring Credit Karma (2020) and Mailchimp (2021), and launching Intuit Assist GenAI (2023).
Intuit went public on the NASDAQ on March 12, 1993, under ticker symbol INTU, pricing at $20 per share and raising $60 million at an initial market valuation of approximately $300 million.
Under then-CEO Brad Smith, Intuit made the courageous decision to cannibalize its lucrative shrink-wrapped desktop CD business, rebuilding QuickBooks and TurboTax as cloud-native web and mobile subscription apps, accelerating ARR growth and gross margins.
In March 2016, Intuit sold its founding desktop product Quicken to private equity firm H.I.G. Capital to concentrate 100% of its resources on cloud-based QuickBooks Online ecosystem expansion.
In 2017, Intuit launched TurboTax Live, creating a two-sided platform that connects taxpayers with thousands of remote CPAs. The service expanded to TurboTax Live Full Service in 2021, capturing large market share from traditional retail tax prep storefronts.
In September 2023, Intuit launched Intuit Assist and its GenOS operating system, embedding generative AI agents across all four platforms to provide automated financial advice, predictive cash flow forecasting, and automated marketing campaigns.
During COVID-19, Intuit helped small businesses secure over $1.2 billion in federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) emergency relief loans directly through QuickBooks Capital, keeping thousands of small business employees on payroll.
Intuit's mission is to 'Power Prosperity Around the World', building an autonomous, AI-driven financial future where consumers maximize their net worth, small businesses thrive with complete automated financial confidence, and no one struggles with taxes or bookkeeping.