The company was founded on 4 December 1987 as Cancom Ventures Inc, owning an Edmonton secretarial college and an industrial equipment rental business.

[4] A wholly owned subsidiary, Ziran Developments Inc, was formed to handle the Chinese text entry business.

Having started with Chinese on personal computers, toward the end of the 1990s Zi's focus moved to text entry for all languages for mobile phones and other handheld devices, where efficient entry of text traditionally has been challenging due to limitations of a physically small device.

[9] The introduction of touch screen technology for mobile devices made the company follow up with software for handwriting recognition, with focus on languages such as Chinese and Japanese.

[15] Other products include eZiType, a predictive text entry product for mobile email users, for keyboard-based mobile devices, Qix, a service discovery engine that provides a quick and easy method for accessing a phone's features, applications, and services, and Decuma which delivers an input method for pen-based devices by fusing handwriting recognition with predictive text technology.