The story
Founding and early growth: 1999–2013
Appian was founded in 1999 by Michael Beckley, Robert Kramer, Marc Wilson and Matthew Calkins, who is CEO.
In 2001, the company developed Army Knowledge Online, regarded at the time as "the world's largest intranet."
In 2008, the company completed a $10,000,000 Series A funding by Novak Biddle Venture Partners. In 2010, Appian Cloud was accredited with Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) low-level security by the U.S. Education Department. In 2013, it received FISMA Moderate Authorization and Accreditation from the General Services Administration (GSA).
Secondary investments and Nasdaq: 2014–2017
In 2014, the company received $37.5 million in secondary investments from New Enterprise Associates, which was paid out to shareholders.
On May 25, 2017, Appian became a publicly traded company, trading as APPN on the NASDAQ Global Exchange.
Process mining and artificial intelligence: 2018–present
In May 2019, Appian released Appian AI. In March 2020, the company updated the platform's artificial intelligence and robotic process automation capabilities.
In 2020, Appian Cloud was certified as compliant with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (SS) maintained by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council. Also in 2020, Appian RPA achieved authorization from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) as part of Appian Cloud. In 2025, Appian Government Cloud (AGC) obtained Federal Risk and Authorization management Program (FedRAMP) High authorization and renewed its Impact Level 5 (IL5) Provisional Authority to Operate (PA) from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) for a three-year period.
In April 2022, process mining was integrated into all Appian products, including its automation, artificial intelligence, and low-code capabilities.
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In May 2022, Appian was awarded $2.04 billion in damages against Pegasystems Inc. Pegasystems was found to have violated the Virginia Computer Crimes Act when it hired a developer to spy on Appian, stealing trade secrets in an operation Pegasystems referred to as "Project Crush". In January 2026, following the decision from the Supreme Court of Virginia remanding the case for retrial and rejecting Pega's arguments seeking to dismiss the case entirely. Appian announced that it would press its trade secret claims against Pegasystems Inc.
In 2025, Appian released AI Document Center (renamed DocCenter in December 2025), which extended the company's intelligent document processing (IDP) capabilities with AI.
From Wikipedia’s article on Appian Corporation, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7