Varien began developing Magento in January of 2007. It was their vision to establish an eCommerce
platform unlike anything else on the market. Varien originally planned on building an eCommerce
platform based on a fork of osCommerce, but decided to write their own system using the Zend
Framework instead. During Varien’s six month beta period, they had over 225,000 downloads of
Magento. The first public release of Magento, version 1.0, was released on March 31, 2008.
Shortly after, Magento 1.1 was released. Magento 1.1 fixed many bugs found in version 1.0, but also
included a faster and more informative administrative user interface. Magento 1.2 was released on
December 29, 2008. This version included several upgraded Zend Framework libraries and a new
feature: downloadable products. Magento 1.3 was released on March 30, 2009. This version increased
Magento’s speed in both public and administrative views. The Magento Enterprise Edition version 1.3
Enterprise was released on April 15, 2009. This version requires a service agreement with Varien and
costs $8,900 USD per year and it includes technical support which is not available with the Community
Edition.
In February 2011, eBay announced it had made an investment in Magento in 2010, worth a 49% ownership share of the company.
As of June 6, 2011 eBay owns 100% of Magento. eBay announced that Magento would join eBay's new X.Commerce initiative
Magento's CEO and co-founder Roy Rubin wrote on the Magento blog stating that "Magento will continue to operate out of Los Angeles, with Yoav Kutner and me as its leaders.".
As of February 2, 2012 Magento passed 4 million downloads of its software platform.