[15][16] The name Joyent was coined by David Paul Young in the second half of 2004, and some early funding obtained from Peter Thiel.

[18] One of the early products was an online collaboration tool named Joyent Connector, an unusually large Ruby on Rails application, which was demonstrated at the Web 2.0 Conference in October 2005, launched in March 2006, open sourced in 2007, and discontinued in August 2011.

[24][25][26] Young became the chief executive of the merged company, while TextDrive CEO Dean Allen, a resident of France, became president and director of Joyent Europe.

[26] Jason Hoffman (from TextDrive), serving as the merged company's chief technical officer, spearheaded the move from TextDrive's initial focus on application hosting to massively distributed systems,[27] leading to a focus on cloud computing software and services to service providers.

[35] In 2010, Joyent purchased LayerBoom, a Vancouver-based startup that provides software for managing virtual machines running on Windows and Linux.

[40] TextDrive and, later, Joyent repeated the money-raising procedure a number of times in order to avoid the venture capital market.

In January 2012, Joyent secured a new round of funding totalling $85 million from Weather Investment II, Accelero Capital, and Telefónica Digital.