Bomis donated the server and bandwidth for Wikipedia’s initial projects. The American dot-com company, founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell and Michael Davis, financially supported Nupedia and helped provide the infrastructure from which Wikipedia emerged.
Wikipedia launched on 15 January 2001 as a fast, wiki-based complement to Nupedia’s slow expert-review process. Bomis supplied web servers and bandwidth, owned important domain names and helped maintain the early servers. This support was crucial when Wikipedia had little independent funding and was still being treated as a project connected to Nupedia.
Bomis was not a Wikimedia Foundation project. Wikipedia remained under Bomis’s corporate umbrella through the end of 2002, but rising costs and the dot-com downturn made continued support difficult. In 2003, Wikipedia was transferred to the newly formed Wikimedia Foundation, and Bomis-owned hardware used for the sites was donated to the foundation.