The company was founded by Dr. Kee Ong in August 1988 as "Object Sciences Corporation". Ong previously worked with the open-source relational database management system
Ingres. Around this time
object-oriented programming (OO) became popular, and the company used research done at the
University of Wisconsin for a commercial database system to complement OO languages. The company's initial executive team included Michael Seashols (CEO), Dr. Kee Ong (CTO), John Hughes (VP, Sales), Dr. Mary Loomis (VP, Services) and Susan Dickerson (VP, Business Development). In early 1990 the company was renamed “Versant Object Technology.” In April 1993 David Banks took over as CEO. On July 18, 1996 Versant had their
initial public offering (IPO) on the
NASDAQ stock exchange and traded under the symbol VSNT. The company raised $14.9 million from the IPO, and was based in
Menlo Park, California at the time, but moved to
Fremont, California in 1997. on July 15, 1998 the company was renamed again to Versant Corporation. In the 1990s, Versant went through a period where most of their R&D costs were spent on "maintaining and upgrading existing product releases" across a large number of operating systems and hardware. According to a former VP of engineering,
outsourcing this maintenance grind of R&D maintenance to India was the main action that allowed the company to survive the decade. In March 2004, Versant acquired Poet Software GmbH, a European-focused company targeting the Windows product market which had traded on the
Frankfurt Stock Exchange. In 2005, Jochen Witte, president of Poet Software, took over as CEO of Versant Corporation. In August 2005, the common stock had a 1-for-10
reverse stock split. On December 1, 2008 Versant acquired the assets of the database software business of Servo Software, Inc. (formerly named db4objects, Inc.). It developed the open source embedded database technology
db4o. It closed in December for an estimated $37 million. ==Products==