ICQ / Mirabilis

From four engineers to software everyone knew

Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser, Amnon Amir and Arik Vardi had met earlier at a small Tel Aviv graphics company called Zapa Digital Arts. In June 1996 they founded Mirabilis together, and in less than two months they wrote ICQ, an abbreviation that sounds like the English phrase "I Seek You". The idea was simple but unprecedented: a small program that sits in the background, knows which of the people in the user's contact list are currently connected to the internet, and lets the user send them an instant text message. Until then there had been no simple way like this to know in real time who was "online" and to communicate with them directly.

A fourth founder, or a fifth? A documented disagreement

Arik Vardi's father, the veteran Israeli businessman Yossi Vardi, invested a few hundred thousand dollars to help get the company started. Sources disagree on how to describe his role: English Wikipedia lists him as a fifth co-founder, while Hebrew Wikipedia and other sources describe him as someone who "helped" and as an investor, not as an active partner in development or day-to-day management. The Hebrew entry on the five ICQ founders goes into this disagreement in more detail. Here, in the entry on the company itself, the four engineers are listed as the founders, with the explicit caveat that there are differing views about Yossi Vardi's place.

1998: the deal that marked a turning point

Less than two years after its founding, on 8 June 1998, the American internet giant AOL acquired Mirabilis. The size of the deal is reported in several ways in different sources. Some give $287 million in cash plus up to $120 million more depending on future performance (a total of up to $407 million), and some give a total of about $407 million directly. Either way, it was at the time the largest deal ever for an Israeli tech company, and many cite it as a turning point that proved to the local industry that it was possible to build a global internet product in Israel and sell it for a huge sum.

From 100 million users to a gradual decline

Under AOL's ownership, ICQ kept growing at an impressive pace: at its peak, around 2001, the service passed 100 million registered accounts worldwide, exceptional numbers for a time before today's social networks. But over the years competitors appeared (AOL's own AIM, MSN Messenger, and later Facebook and WhatsApp), and ICQ's relative weight in the instant messaging market gradually faded. In 2010 AOL sold the service to the Russian investment company Digital Sky Technologies (DST) for only $187.5 million, a sharp drop from the 1998 price that shows how much the product's standing had changed in less than a decade.

28 years, and then a final shutdown in 2024

DST later became Mail.Ru Group, known today as VK, one of the largest internet companies in Russia, and under its ownership ICQ kept running, mainly among Russian-speaking users. On 24 May 2024 VK officially announced that the ICQ service would shut down permanently on 26 June 2024, after 28 years of continuous operation, directing the remaining users to the VK Messenger and VK WorkSpace services. It is important to separate two dates that are sometimes confused: 1998 is the year the company was sold to AOL, at the height of its success; 2024 is the year the service itself was shut down, after two changes of ownership and long years of gradual decline out of the spotlight.