Yellowfin was founded in Melbourne, Australia in 2003 by a group of business intelligence industry veterans.
The company released its first product, a ROLAP (Relational OLAP) browser-based web application for a SAAS software vendor in 2004. This resulted in an early specialization in providing both embedded reporting capabilities to software companies as well as support for the complexities of multi-tenancy hosted environments.
The product is based on an open server architecture and was developed in Java. The design provided the basis for subsequent releases to introduce additional levels of functionality.