Some guys, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, raised $300,000 to start a Web mail service in 1996.

Who is the inventor of Hotmail?įor those of us writing about the Web, and the early days of the dot-com boom, back in the mid-90s, the story of Hotmail was one of those moments that helped establish the mythology of that era. In December 1997, Bhatia sold Hotmail to Microsoft for a reported $400 million.

The company opened on Jwith Smith as its Chief Technology Officer. Smith came up with the idea for anonymous web-based email in 1995, and worked with Sabeer Bhatia, his colleague at Apple, to found the company.