Gavagai was formed in 2008 by Magnus Sahlgren and Jussi Karlgren, based on over ten years of research in computation, linguistics and cognitive science at SICS, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, inspired by the groundbreaking work by Pentti Kanerva on Sparse Distributed Memory models. Pentti is now a scientific advisor to the company.

The original founders, Magnus and Jussi, are the Chief Scientist and CEO of the company, respectively, with a team compounded of business developers, computational linguists, computer scientists and security analysts. Most of the staff have PhDs and publish original research in academic venues. (Browse the Gavagai publication list.)

The name "Gavagai" is inspired by a thought experiment by the Harvard philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908 - 2000). We like his work.