CARIS also has offices in the Netherlands, the United States and Australia, and has re-sellers offering sales and support of software products to more than 75 countries.

The company was founded in Fredericton in 1979 as Universal Systems Ltd. and was a spin-off from research into data structures and computer-aided cartography at the University of New Brunswick's Department of Survey Engineering (now the Department of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering).

The company's first commercial software product was called "CARIS" whose acronym stood for "Computer Aided Resource Information System".

The company name was changed from Universal Systems Ltd. to CARIS in the early 2000s in recognition of this first product and recognized brand.

[1] Teledyne CARIS Inc. is a member of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and is a proponent of interoperability between different GIS systems.