JetBrains is a software-tools company best known for integrated development environments and for the Kotlin programming language. In its own 20-year retrospective, the company describes its origins in 2000, when “the popular languages were C++, Java, C, and PHP,” and recounts starting as “a company of three, working in Prague with a single product serving 800 customers.” That first product line grew into a broad family of developer tools.
The company’s flagship product is IntelliJ IDEA, an IDE for Java and other languages. The same retrospective notes that JetBrains “began with IntelliJ IDEA for Java,” and the product became the foundation of the JetBrains platform on which many of its later IDEs are built. Over two decades the company expanded from a single tool into a suite serving millions of developers.
JetBrains also created Kotlin. The official Kotlin FAQ states that the language “is developed by JetBrains” and that “the project started in 2010 and was open source from very early on.” The company’s own retrospective calls Kotlin its “own open-source programming language” and notes that it “has become the preferred programming language for Android.”
JetBrains illustrates a pattern common in software history: a tools vendor whose deep work on language tooling led it to design a language of its own. Its development environments shaped how a generation of Java and JVM programmers wrote code, and Kotlin extended that influence into a language used across servers, browsers, and mobile devices.