It started with Agoric Enterprises, Inc. which was founded in 1991 by Kevin Lacobie, Bill Tulloh, and Mark Miller  in Fairfax, Virginia, with a focus on collaborative applications. Agoric Enterprises was one of the early member's of Patrica Seybold Company's Lotus Notes network, and has been featured in Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 newsletter.  Agoric Enterprises was also responsible for creating and running the world's first online software components marketplace, the Smalltalk Components Marketplace on the path-breaking American Information Exchange.

The founding trio later went on to start Agorics, Inc. , with six other principals, in Los Altos, California. This company started with a research and development contract from Sun Labs, where we delivered computational markets-based applications, and related technologies, such as electronic checks. Agorics, Inc. thrives today as a consulting company, developing new security environments.

These companies in turn owe their genesis to the Agorics Project, a research program at George Mason University, and the inspiring "Agorics Papers" (1986), written by Mark Miller and Eric Drexler to explain the benefits of computational markets and economics. The Agorics Papers have been broadly influential and widely cited, including Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", an early manifesto on the open source community.

Agoric Source, LLC itself was founded in November 2002.