Amazon was founded in 1994 as an online bookstore by Jeff Bezos.
Bezos incorporated the company in Washington state in July 1994, initially using the name Cadabra, Inc. The business opened as Amazon.com in 1995 and began by selling books online because books offered a large, searchable catalog that a physical store could not easily match.
Amazon later expanded into electronics, household goods, digital media, advertising, logistics, and cloud computing. Amazon Web Services became a particularly important business, providing infrastructure and software services to companies and public organizations worldwide.
The company’s name is sometimes mistakenly tied to its launch year rather than its founding year. Amazon began operating as a website in 1995, but the company itself was founded in 1994.