The company was founded in Warsaw in 1893, and holds a prominent place in Polish tractor production history.

It was first named: Towarzystwo Udziałowe Specyalnej Fabryki Armatur (Company of a Special Factory of Fixture), later with an addition: i Motorów (and Motors).

[2] It began producing valves and pumps, intended first of all to Tsarist Russian market, as Poland had been partitioned by that time and most of its territory was annexed by Russia.

[2] In 1903 (other sources claim 1907), when the factory began to produce internal combustion engines, the word Ursus (Latin for bear) was added to the logo, inspired by the character from Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel Quo Vadis.

[4] From 1922, the company built a limited number of its first and only interwar agricultural tractor, based upon International Harvester Titan.

[5] In connection with plans to produce a truck chosen by the Polish Army, the company received a credit and in 1924 built a new big factory in Czechowice (later renamed Ursus and included into Warsaw).

[6] In 1930, the Ursus factory fell on hard times due to the world financial crisis and was nationalised under the Państwowe Zakłady Inżynieryjne (National Engineering Works, PZInż), the Polish manufacturer of arms and vehicles.

Workers of the Ursus tractor factory played a large role in the solidarity movement in the 1970s and 1980s.

This was one of the largest and most disruptive strikes that occurred that day, and resulted in the prime minister announcing on television the withdrawal of the food price increase.

In 1977, a 7.9 million dollar export-import bank loan and a 7 million dollar loan from private American banks were granted to the Ursus tractor factory for the purpose of purchasing machine tools from the Ingersoll Milling Machine Company of Rockford, Illinois, and Gleason Works in Rochester, New York.

Gierek had invested nearly 1 billion dollars into a project of developing a modern Massey Ferguson model of tractor at Ursus, however due to licensing problems, these tractors could not be sold in the Western Bloc during the Cold War for political reasons, and in the Eastern Bloc neither because they were too expensive.

The decline in production was due to the enormous debt that Ursus had contracted as a result of its expansion programme in the 1980s.