Excite was founded as Architext in

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 USD$80,000 to develop an online service. In January 1995, Vinod Khosla (a former Stanford student), a partner at the venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, arranged a USD$250,000 "first round" backing for the project, with USD$1.5 million provided over a ten-month period. Soon thereafter, Geoff Yang, of Institutional Venture Partners, introduced an additional USD$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 (CEO). Excite also purchased two search engines (Magellan and WebCrawler) and signed exclusive distribution agreements with Netscape, Microsoft and Apple, in addition to other companies. In 1994, Excite hired Jim Bellows, then 72, to figure out how to present the content in a journalistic manner. He paid good journalists to write brief reviews of web sites. However, users wanted to get directly to the content and skipped the reviews, so the partnership with Bellows ended in 1998.

On April 4, 1996, Excite went public with an initial offering of two million shares. In June 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 agent. 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 had only enough available capital to meet obligations through December.[2] 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.

According to Justin Rohrlich, writing for Minyanville.com, later in 1999, two graduate students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, decided that Google, the search engine they had developed, was taking up time they should have been using to study. They went to Bell and offered it to him for $1 million, but Bell rejected the offer, and later threw Vinod Khosla, one of Excite's venture capitalists, out of his office after he had negotiated Brin and Page down to $750,000. Excite's refusal to buy what became a $180 billion company by 2010 was labeled by Rohrlich a "stupid business decision".[3]

Excite@Home[edit]
Main article: @Home Network

Excite@Home headquarters for sale. The buildings have since been re-purposed as a medical facility
The USD$6.7 billion merger of Excite and @Home Network in 1999 became one of the largest mergers of two Internet companies at the time. @Home's high-speed Internet services and existing portal were combined with Excite's search engine and portal, with a move towards personalized web portal content following the merger.[citation needed] The new company was named "Excite@Home" (the stock symbol and the company's name in regulatory filing records remained as "At Home Corporation" (ATHM)) and, six months after the merger, Tom Jermoluk stepped down as CEO of Excite@Home. Excite’s George Bell, who was the President of the Excite division of @Home after the merger, became the new CEO of the combined Excite@Home, whilst Jermoluk remained Chairman of the Board.

Following the merger, the Excite division purchased iMall, as well as online greeting card company, Blue Mountain Arts. Excite also acquired photo sharing company Webshots. Excite furthermore paid for sponsorship of Infiniti Indy car driver Eddie Cheever, Jr., through the 2000 and 2001 racing seasons. However, the merger between Excite and @Home fell disastrously short of expectations. Online advertising revenue plummeted, while cable network ISP revenue continued to grow. On September 21, 2000, after stock value had dropped 90%, George Bell announced plans to step down as CEO within six months. On April 23, 2001, Excite@Home announced Patti S. Hart, the former CEO of Telocity, would become its third CEO in three years. In the same announcement, George Bell resigned and left the company completely. The company also reported first-quarter net loss of $61.6 million, compared with a loss of $4.6 million in the same period the prior year.

On June 11, 2001, Excite@Home announced that it had raised $100 million in financing from Promethean Capital Management and Angelo Gordon & Co. Part of the deal was that the loan was repayable immediately if Excite@Home stock was delisted by NASDAQ.