ServiceNow, Inc.
Enterprise Cloud SoftwareFounded 2003- Updated July 2025
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Last reviewed: July 2025
CorpDigest
ServiceNow, Inc.
Company History
Founded 2003 in Santa Clara, California
Last reviewed: 2025-07-15 · By Swet Parvadiya
Fred Luddy founded the company in San Diego in 2003 as Glidesoft, Inc. — a reflection of the original product focus on glide-path workflows — before rebranding as Service-Now.com in 2006. Luddy had been CTO of Peregrine Systems, which had filed for bankruptcy in 2002 amid an accounting scandal; he brought the technical architecture insights from that experience but started fresh without the legacy codebase or customer relationships.
The first venture financing — $13 million from JMI Equity in 2005 — funded the early growth at a moment when the company had already reached cash-flow positive status with $13 million in revenue, an unusually capital-efficient early stage. Frank Slootman's recruitment as CEO in 2011 was the inflection point that transformed a profitable small software company into a publicly traded enterprise software category leader. Slootman's SAP and Data Domain background in enterprise sales transformed the go-to-market motion from founder-led relationship selling to systematic enterprise sales organization.
The 2019 CEO transition from John Donahoe to Bill McDermott — Donahoe left to become Nike CEO — brought SAP's former chief executive to a company that was growing rapidly and needed the specific enterprise relationship network that McDermott had built across 23 years at SAP. McDermott's arrival accelerated the expansion into regulated industries, federal government accounts, and the largest global enterprises. The Moveworks acquisition in 2025 and G2K Group in 2024 represent the continuing strategy of augmenting platform capability through targeted acquisitions rather than building every functionality organically.
Fred Luddy has served as ServiceNow's founder and a member of the board of directors since the company's inception in 2003. He served as the company's chief executive officer from 2003 until 2011, when he recruited Frank Slootman to lead the company through its IPO and scaling phase. Luddy has remained actively involved in the company's strategic direction and product vision, serving as a board member and maintaining a significant equity stake. He is known for his technical depth and his insistence on architectural purity, which shaped the Now Platform's multi-instance design and cloud-native infrastructure. Luddy's 2024 compensation as a board member was $40,000, reflecting his limited formal operational role, though his influence on company culture and technology strategy remains substantial. He has been credited with creating the foundational platform architecture that enabled ServiceNow to scale from a single ITSM product to a comprehensive digital workflow platform serving 8,700 enterprise customers.
David Loo served as a co-founder and early technical leader at ServiceNow, contributing to the initial platform development and architecture decisions that shaped the company's cloud-native approach. He remained with the company through its early growth phase and played a key role in establishing the engineering culture that prioritized scalability and reliability. Loo's contributions were foundational to the platform's ability to serve enterprise customers from a multi-tenant cloud infrastructure, a technical achievement that differentiated ServiceNow from on-premise competitors.
Don Goodliffe served as a co-founder and early member of the ServiceNow team, contributing to the development of the company's initial IT service management product and the establishment of early customer relationships. His work helped validate the product-market fit that would eventually attract venture capital financing and enable the company's scaling. Goodliffe's contributions to the founding team provided the technical and operational diversity that complemented Fred Luddy's vision.
Bow Ruggeri served as a co-founder and early technical contributor at ServiceNow, helping to build the initial platform infrastructure and establish the engineering practices that would scale to support thousands of enterprise customers. Ruggeri's technical contributions were part of the founding team's collective effort to create a cloud-based alternative to on-premise IT service management software.
Patrick Casey has served as ServiceNow's Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of DevOps, maintaining a technical leadership role for over two decades since co-founding the company in 2003. Casey has overseen the evolution of the Now Platform from a simple ITSM tool to a comprehensive digital workflow platform, and his continued presence in the C-suite represents a rare example of founder technical leadership persistence in a company that has scaled to $13 billion in revenue. Casey's role in maintaining architectural continuity while enabling product expansion has been critical to the platform's reliability and scalability.
Fred Luddy founded Glidesoft, Inc. in San Diego, California, with the vision of creating a cloud-native IT service management platform. Luddy was the sole employee until mid-2005, writing the initial code and establishing the architectural foundation that would enable the company's future scaling.
Glidesoft raised $2.5 million in venture financing from JMI Equity, allowing the company to hire five additional employees and accelerate product development. This financing marked the transition from founder-only operation to a funded startup with growth ambitions.
Glidesoft, Inc. changed its name to Service-Now.com, reflecting the company's focus on providing IT services through a web-based platform. The rebranding positioned the company for enterprise market recognition and established the naming convention that would eventually become ServiceNow.
ServiceNow achieved its first cash-flow-positive year with $13 million in annual revenue and opened its first Silicon Valley office in San Jose. This milestone validated the cloud-native business model and provided the financial stability to fund expansion.
ServiceNow recruited Frank Slootman as chief executive officer, bringing enterprise software scaling expertise from his previous role leading Data Domain through its acquisition by EMC. Slootman's hiring signaled the company's transition from founder-led startup to professionally managed growth company.
ServiceNow completed its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange through a $210 million IPO led by Morgan Stanley, one month after the same bank took Facebook public. The IPO valued the company at approximately $2.2 billion and provided capital for global expansion.
Following the IPO, ServiceNow relocated its headquarters from San Diego to Santa Clara, California, to access the Silicon Valley talent pool and venture capital ecosystem. This move positioned the company at the center of the enterprise software industry.
John Donahoe, former CEO of eBay and Bain & Company, succeeded Frank Slootman as chief executive officer, bringing consumer-industry experience and a relationship-focused sales culture. Donahoe's tenure saw revenue grow from $1.9 billion to $3.8 billion and market capitalization more than triple.
ServiceNow announced that Bill McDermott, former CEO of SAP SE, would succeed John Donahoe as chief executive officer by year-end 2019. McDermott brought 17 years of enterprise software leadership experience and a track record of tripling SAP's market value to approximately $140 billion.
Bill McDermott appointed Gina Mastantuono as chief financial officer in January 2020, establishing the leadership partnership that would drive the company's financial transformation. Mastantuono would later be named President while continuing as CFO in 2025.
Nvidia announced a partnership with ServiceNow to integrate generative AI services into the company's help desk and workflow products, marking the beginning of ServiceNow's strategic pivot toward AI platform positioning.
ServiceNow crossed $10 billion in annual revenue for the first time, with fiscal year 2024 subscription revenues of $10.646 billion and total revenues of $10.984 billion. This milestone earned the company a spot on the Fortune 500 list and established it as one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies at scale.
ServiceNow and Google Cloud broadened their partnership to launch ServiceNow on Google Cloud Marketplace and Google Distributed Cloud, integrating Workflow Data Fabric and cross-enterprise workflows with Google Cloud AI infrastructure.
ServiceNow executed its first-ever stock split, a 5-for-1 division approved by shareholders on December 5, 2025, with distribution after market close on December 17, 2025, and split-adjusted trading beginning December 18, 2025. The split reduced the nominal share price from approximately $854 to $171.
ServiceNow announced a multi-year CAD$110 million investment to establish a Canada Centre of Excellence, including Canada-hosted AI services, as part of the company's global infrastructure expansion strategy.
ServiceNow acquired G2K Group to enhance its AI-powered retail and venue management capabilities, adding computer vision and IoT integration technologies that complement the company's workflow automation platform. The acquisition supported ServiceNow's vertical industry expansion strategy.
ServiceNow acquired Moveworks, an AI-powered IT support automation company, to strengthen its generative AI capabilities and autonomous IT service management. The acquisition was the largest in ServiceNow's history and reflected the strategic priority of AI platform leadership.
Fred Luddy founded Glidesoft, Inc. in June 2003 in San Diego, California, just two years after the spectacular collapse of his prior employer Peregrine Systems amid an accounting fraud scandal that wiped out shareholders and forced bankruptcy in September 2002. Luddy had served as chief technology officer of Peregrine, the ServiceCenter ITSM market leader, and watched executives outside engineering inflate revenue through fictitious customer transactions. He left in 2002, vowed to build a more transparent and modern alternative, and personally funded the early development of the Glide platform, a generalized workflow engine designed from the start as a multi-tenant cloud application rather than the on-premise client-server software that dominated the ITSM market at the time. The original product targeted IT service management, allowing IT departments to log incidents, manage changes, track configuration items, and automate workflows entirely through a web browser without on-premise infrastructure. Glidesoft renamed itself Service-Now.com in 2006 to reflect the SaaS-only delivery model, and again to ServiceNow as the brand grew beyond IT. Luddy bootstrapped the company through 2005 when JMI Equity led the first venture financing of $8.5 million, and by 2007 ServiceNow generated $13 million in revenue and was cash flow positive.
Frank Slootman joined ServiceNow as CEO in May 2011, recruited by JMI Equity and the board to professionalize and scale the company from approximately $75 million in revenue toward an IPO and beyond. Slootman, a Dutch-born technology operator with a track record at Compuware, EMC's Data Domain subsidiary, and earlier startups, had just sold Data Domain to EMC for $2.4 billion in 2009 and was looking for his next operating challenge. At ServiceNow he replaced Fred Luddy as CEO, with Luddy moving to the chief product officer role to remain focused on the platform. Slootman drove the relocation of corporate headquarters from San Diego to Santa Clara, California, in 2012 to access the broader Silicon Valley enterprise software talent pool, accelerated international expansion into Europe and Asia-Pacific, built a high-performance enterprise sales organization, and led the company through its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2012 at $18 per share, raising $210 million and valuing the company at approximately $2.5 billion. Revenue grew from $75 million in fiscal 2011 to $682 million in fiscal 2014, an annualized growth rate above 100%. Slootman remained CEO through April 2017 before leaving to become CEO of Snowflake.
ServiceNow's expansion from a single-product IT service management company into a multi-workflow enterprise platform was a deliberate strategic shift that accelerated from 2014 onward. The company introduced the Now Platform branding in 2017 to formalize the underlying workflow engine as a generalized platform on which any business process could be built. Major product line extensions included Customer Service Management launched in 2016 to compete with Salesforce Service Cloud and Zendesk in enterprise customer support workflows, HR Service Delivery launched in 2016 for employee onboarding, case management, and lifecycle workflows, Security Operations launched in 2017 for incident response and vulnerability management, IT Operations Management for monitoring and event management, IT Business Management for portfolio and project management, and Governance Risk and Compliance. The expansion followed Slootman's strategy of land-and-expand: enter customers through ITSM at IT departments, then expand into adjacent workflow categories as the customer relationship matures. By 2024 ITSM was no longer the majority of net new business, with employee experience, customer service, and security workflows contributing significant growth. The platform approach also enabled the App Engine product for customers and partners to build custom applications on the Now Platform, expanding the addressable market significantly.
John Donahoe joined ServiceNow as president and CEO on April 1, 2017, succeeding Frank Slootman who became chairman before leaving the company entirely. Donahoe, the former CEO of eBay from 2008 to 2015, brought significant enterprise and consumer technology leadership experience but was viewed by some industry observers as a less natural fit for the highly technical ServiceNow customer base. During his tenure, revenue grew from $1.93 billion in 2017 to $3.46 billion in 2019, and the customer count expanded substantially. Donahoe accelerated the platform expansion strategy launched under Slootman, supervised major product launches in customer and employee workflows, and grew international operations. He also began the cultural transition from a sales-led startup to a more disciplined large-enterprise operating company. In October 2019 Donahoe announced his departure to become CEO of Nike, where he assumed the role in January 2020, and ServiceNow announced Bill McDermott as his successor effective November 2019. The transition was unusually rapid by enterprise software standards, with the board, McDermott, and Donahoe coordinating an immediate handoff that preserved customer and investor confidence. Donahoe served on the ServiceNow board briefly during the transition before fully focusing on Nike. The leadership change set up the accelerated growth and expansion phase under McDermott.
Under Bill McDermott's leadership starting November 2019, ServiceNow's revenue trajectory accelerated significantly, with the company crossing the $10 billion annualized revenue milestone in 2024 and reporting full-year 2024 subscription revenue of approximately $10.65 billion and total revenue of approximately $10.98 billion. From $3.46 billion in 2019 when McDermott joined, revenue grew at a compound annual growth rate of approximately 25%, an unusually durable expansion at scale for an enterprise software company. The growth reflected continued workflow platform extension into customer experience, employee experience, technology workflows, and creator workflows; the acceleration of digital transformation spending during and after the COVID-19 pandemic; aggressive sales hiring and international expansion particularly in Europe, India, Japan, and Latin America; and the company's emerging role as a generative AI platform with the launch of Now Assist beginning in late 2023. The customer base expanded from approximately 5,000 enterprise customers in 2019 to more than 8,100 by 2024, including most of the Fortune 500. Renewal rates remained at the industry-leading 98 to 99% level, supporting subscription revenue growth and predictability. The company's market capitalization expanded from approximately $50 billion at McDermott's arrival to a peak above $200 billion in late 2024.