As confocal microscopes were first becoming commercially available, the founders of Bitplane, Marius Messerli, Karl-Hermann Fuchs, and Jürgen Holm, realised that there was no suitable way to visualize and analyze the images provided by this more modern equipment.

When Imaris was introduced to the market in 1993 it ran only on Silicon Graphics (SGI) workstations as at the time only these were capable to perform 3D volume rendering at a speed worthy of being deemed "interactive".

From 1994 to 1997, in co-operation with the Maurice E. Muller foundation in Bern, Switzerland, Bitplane launched a second line of software products for the documentation and management of medical information for orthopedic surgeons.

After having weathered a slowing in demand caused by the burst of the internet bubble in 2001, Bitplane steadily grew in sales, market share, and profitability.

The first combination of a confocal microscope with specialized computer hardware that enabled digital image processing was presented by Van der Voort et al. (1985).