It was founded in 2004 by Ben Werdmuller and Dave Tosh, based on informal papers they had written over the previous year.

[2] Combining their experience (Werdmuller was a web entrepreneur who had been building and facilitating online communities since 1995, while Tosh was a postgraduate student in online education) they created a social networking approach to e-learning,[3] with the former designing the architecture and writing most of the code.

Subsequently, they founded the company Curverider Ltd to continue the development of the software and to provide Elgg-related services.

[11] The same applies for the self-organized Anillo Sur and Saravea Lorea latinamerican social networks.

In April 2010, a multiple site version of Elgg was released by the former core developer Marcus Povey.