MicroStrategy
More info
- Creator
- Michael Saylor, Sanju Bansal
- Released
- 1989
- Type
- Software company
- Website
- strategy.com
A business intelligence vendor that became a bitcoin fund with a software business on the side.
Michael Saylor and Sanju Bansal founded MicroStrategy in Virginia in 1989 to sell analytics tools: reports and OLAP cubes on top of corporate data warehouses. It was a dot-com darling until March 2000, when it had to restate several years of revenue. The stock fell more than 60 percent in a single day and Saylor settled with the SEC.
The software faced competition from friendlier tools like Tableau and Qlik, but that isn't why anyone has heard of the company today. From 2020 Saylor began buying bitcoin with the company's cash, then with borrowed money, until the holdings were worth far more than the rest of the business. In 2025 it renamed itself simply Strategy.