The company was founded in 1969 by six young employees at the consulting firm AIV (Institut für Angewandte Informationsverarbeitung). One of the founders was the mathematician Peter Schnell, who later became chairman of the board for many years. ADABAS was launched in 1971 as a high-performance transactional database management system. In 1979, Natural, a 4GL application development English-like language, that was mainly developed by Peter Pagé, was launched.