RingLead was founded in 2003 by Steve Lehr, a former developer for Postini, the anti-spam technology company that was acquired by Google. During his time at Postini, Steve was one of the chief engineers responsible for developing the algorithm that identifies duplicated text strings across large sets of data. In 2003, Steve founded RingLead, which built upon this core technology and allowed customers to easily identify existing duplicates in their database, as well as prevent the creation of new duplicate records in Salesforce. As an emerging market player at the time, Salesforce quickly noticed the value that RingLead's applications offered its clients (which numbered in the hundreds at that point) and chose RingLead as the first validated service offering – a partner program that was the predecessor to the Salesforce AppExchange.