The Development of KNIME was started January 2004 by a team of software engineers at University of Konstanz as a proprietary product. The original developer team headed by Michael Berthold came from a company in Silicon Valley providing software for the pharmaceutical industry. The initial goal was to create a modular, highly scalable and open data processing platform which allowed for the easy integration of different data loading, processing, transformation, analysis and visual exploration modules without the focus on any particular application area.