Art Technology Group started in Cambridge as a small consulting firm with an artful name, and ended up running the online stores of big brands. Its software let those stores remember each customer and tailor what they saw. When it filed to go public in the summer of 1999, big brands were racing to sell on the web. ATG offered them a serious platform for doing it.

Dynamo and the MIT Founders

Jeet Singh and Joe Chung, both with roots at MIT, founded ATG in 1991. They bet that big online businesses would need a powerful platform built for personalization, a step beyond a catalog and a cart. ATG's Dynamo software showed each visitor different products and offers based on that visitor's behavior. That made it popular with big retailers and media companies.

A Billion From Oracle

ATG priced at $12 a share in July 1999 and became one of the hottest software stocks of the boom. The crash hit it hard and forced deep cuts. The company recovered as big retailers kept spending on online sales. Its commerce platform became a common choice for major brands. In 2011, nearly twelve years after its offering, Oracle bought ATG for about $1 billion.

Cover: The Artist in His Studio, James McNeill Whistler. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an artist in his studio (the art in Art Technology Group).