Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen founded Netscape in 1994.
The company began as Mosaic Communications Corporation on April 4, 1994. Entrepreneur Jim Clark recruited Marc Andreessen, who had helped develop the Mosaic web browser at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Their partnership shifted toward creating a commercial browser and a broader internet software company.
The company changed its name to Netscape Communications Corporation in November 1994 after a trademark dispute involving the Mosaic name. Its flagship product, Netscape Navigator, made web browsing accessible to a mass audience and helped accelerate commercial use of the World Wide Web.
Netscape is often confused with Mosaic because Navigator descended from work by several Mosaic developers, but Mosaic itself was developed at NCSA. Netscape’s spectacular initial public offering in August 1995 became a defining moment of the dot-com era. AOL acquired Netscape in 1999, and the brand later became central to the browser wars against Microsoft Internet Explorer.