Overview

Strategy Inc., stylized as Strategy^(₿) and formerly known as MicroStrategy, is an American company that provides business intelligence (BI) and mobile software. Founded in 1989 by Michael J. Saylor, Sanju Bansal, and Thomas Spahr, the firm develops software to analyze internal and external data in order to make business decisions and to develop mobile apps. It is a public company headquartered in Tysons Corner, Virginia, in the Washington metropolitan area. Its primary business analytics competitors include SAP SE Business Objects, IBM Cognos, and Oracle Corporation's BI Platform.

Saylor is the executive chairman and, from 1989 to 2022, was the CEO.

Since 2020, the company's securities are widely considered to be a bitcoin proxy due to Strategy's holdings of the cryptocurrency. Saylor has compared it to a bitcoin spot leveraged ETF, though it is not a regulated investment fund.

As of November 17, 2025, Strategy was reported to own over 650,000 bitcoins, worth roughly $59.69 billion, and is the largest corporate holder of the asset. This strategy has primarily been driven by Saylor.

History

Saylor started MicroStrategy in 1989 with a consulting contract from DuPont, which provided Saylor with $250,000 in start-up capital and office space in Wilmington, Delaware. Saylor was soon joined by company co-founder Sanju Bansal, whom he had met while the two were students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The company produced software for data mining and business intelligence using nonlinear mathematics, an idea inspired by a course on systems-dynamics theory that they took at MIT.

In 1992, MicroStrategy gained its first major client when it signed a $10 million contract with McDonald's. It increased revenues by 100% each year between 1990 and 1996. In 1994, the company's offices and its 50 employees moved from Delaware to Tysons Corner, Virginia.

On June 11, 1998, MicroStrategy became a public company via an initial public offering. The company sold 36 million shares of its common stock, each share priced at $6, under the stock ticker "MSTR" on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

Bitcoin purchases

In August 2020, MicroStrategy invested $250 million in bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset, citing declining returns from cash, a weakening dollar, and other global macroeconomic factors. The company went on to make several additional large purchases of bitcoin; on September 19, 2022, MicroStrategy and its subsidiaries held approximately 130,000 BTC, acquired at an aggregate purchase price of $3.98 billion at an average purchase price of $30,639 per bitcoin. Executive chairman Saylor has been described as working to "funnel nearly all of Strategy’s available funds" into Bitcoin.

On the company's quarterly earnings call on May 3, 2022, MicroStrategy CFO Phong Le stated that the company would face a margin call if bitcoin's price fell to about $21,000. A margin call would obligate the company to sell some of its bitcoin holdings. Le stated that the company could add more collateral to its loan to avoid such a situation. After bitcoin's price fell to about $20,800 in June 2022, the company said that it had not received a margin call and that it had enough capital to withstand further volatility.

On December 22, 2022, MicroStrategy sold 704 BTC, which represented its first time selling any bitcoin, for an amount of around $11.8 million.

On September 25, 2023, MicroStrategy announced that, during the period between August 1, 2023, and September 24, 2023, MicroStrategy and its subsidiaries acquired 5,445 bitcoins for $147.3 million in cash, at an average price of $27,053 per bitcoin, inclusive of fees and expenses.

Products

MicroStrategy 2020 is the latest platform release of the company's business intelligence software.

MicroStrategy 2019, the prior platform release, attempted to improve connectivity to data sources and applications and allow for easier mobile application development. it also offered Bluetooth identity detection and voice. The earlier suite of software, MicroStrategy 10, consisted of MicroStrategy Analytics, MicroStrategy Mobile, and Usher. MicroStrategy 10.10, released in December 2017, added MicroStrategy Workstation.

It uses business intelligence and predictive analytics to search through and perform analytics on big data from a variety of sources, including data warehouses, Excel files, and Apache Hadoop distributions.

MicroStrategy Mobile, introduced in 2010, incorporates analytics capabilities to apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry.