Pure Software

Pure Software was an American software development tools company founded in October 1991 by Reed Hastings, Raymond Peck and Mark Box. Its flagship product was Purify, a debugging and memory leak detection tool for Unix software applications written in C. The company is notable as the first significant venture of Reed Hastings, who later co-founded Netflix.

Pure Software was founded in October 1991. Its original product, Purify, helped software developers detect memory errors and bugs in C programs by instrumenting compiled code to track memory usage at runtime. The company subsequently added complementary tools including Quantify, a performance profiler, and PureLink, a linker-based tool. Revenue doubled every year for four years,¹ and the company went public on NASDAQ in August 1995, led by Morgan Stanley.²

In August 1996, Pure Software merged with Atria Software to form Pure Atria Corporation.³ In August 1997, Rational Software acquired Pure Atria, a deal that gave Hastings the capital to start his next venture.⁴⁵ The acquisition triggered a 42% drop in the stock prices of both companies.⁶ Hastings was appointed Chief Technical Officer of the combined company,⁶ but departed shortly after. He subsequently co-founded Netflix in 1997, later reflecting that management challenges at Pure Software had shaped his thinking about company culture.⁷