It all started in 1989 when , then a student, founded BIT Software . Their first product wasn't OCR, but a dictionary app called Lingvo. The team realized that for a dictionary to be truly useful, people needed a way to get printed text into the computer without retyping it. This necessity birthed FineReader 1.0 in 1993. Evolutionary Milestones

FineReader 11.0, released in 2017, marked another significant update. This version introduced a new verification tool, improved recognition accuracy for handwritten text, and added support for more languages. FineReader 11.0 also included a built-in PDF editor and supported creation of searchable PDF files.