Excite is an Internet portal, and as one of the "dotcoms" of the 1990s (along with Yahoo! and Netscape), it was once one of the most recognized brands on the Internet. Today it offers a variety of services, including search, web-based email, instant messaging, stock quotes, and a customizable user homepage. The content is collated from over 100 different sources.

Startup

Excite was founded as Architext in 1994 by Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark Van Haren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch and Martin Reinfried, who were all students at Stanford University. In July 1994 International Data Group paid them $100,000 to develop an online service. In January 1995, Vinod Khosla (himself a former Stanford student), a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, arranged a $250,000 first round backing for the project with $1.5 million in ten months. Soon thereafter, Geoff Yang of Institutional Venture Partners brought in an additional $1.5 million in financing, and Excite was formally launched in December 1995.

In January 1996, George Bell joined Excite as its Chief Executive Officer. Excite also bought two search engines (Magellan and WebCrawler), and signed exclusive distribution agreements with Netscape, Microsoft, Apple, and other companies. On April 4, 1996, Excite went public with an initial offering of two million shares. In June of 1997, Intuit, maker of Quicken and TurboTax. purchased a 19% stake in Excite and finalized a seven-year partnership deal.

On October 16, 1997, Excite purchased Netbot, a comparison shopping service. At the same time Intuit announced the launch of Excite Business & Investing. Later that year a deal was finalized with Ticketmaster to provide direct online ticketing.

On March 31 1998, Excite reported a net loss of approximately $30.2 million and according to its first quarter report it only had enough available capital to meet obligations through December. In December 1998, Yahoo! was in negotiations to purchase Excite for $5.5 billion to $6 billion. However, prompted by Kleiner Perkins, @Home Network's Chairman and CEO, Thomas Jermoluk met with Excite's chairman and CEO George Bell on December 19, and Excite was subsequently acquired by @Home Network, on January 19, 1999.

Excite@Home

Main: @Home Network The $6.7 billion merger of Excite and @Home became one of the largest mergers of two Internet companies ever; it combined @Home's high speed internet services and existing portal with Excite's search engine and portal. The new portal also moved towards a concept that today has become commonplace, but was cutting edge at the time: personalized web portal content.