Nisus (pronouced Nice Us) Software Inc. was founded by Jerzy Lewak PhD in 1983 as a software development company named Paragon Courseware. The company was incorporated in 1987 and the name was changed to Paragon Concepts. In 1993, the name was changed again to Nisus Software, Inc. due to the name recognition of the word processor, Nisus Writer.

A complete timeline of the history of Nisus Software can be read here.

The company mission has always been to "develop software which enables users' creativity by breaking down unnecessary barriers."

We try to remove as many (traditional) limitations as possible. We do not hide features behind multiple layered dialogs, and work hard to make our features as convenient for the user as possible.

Some features in Nisus Writer Classic and Nisus Writer Pro, for example, reflect this philosophy: an editable clipboard, multiple clipboards, (both first introduced by us), a PowerFind and PowerFind Pro feature (within a Word Processor, also pioneered by Nisus), non-contiguous selections and a powerful macro language for customizing features and for extending the capabilities of the application.

More generally, we strive to have our feature implementations make those little details which we take for granted, easy, useful and non-distracting.