About Company

Basecamp, formerly named 37signals, is a privately held American web application company based in Chicago, Illinois. The firm was co-founded in 1999 by Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim as a web design company.

Since mid-2004, the company's focus has shifted from web design to web application development. Its first commercial application was Basecamp; this was followed by Backpack, Campfire, and Highrise. The open source web application framework Ruby on Rails was initially created for internal use at 37signals, before being publicly released in 2004.