Autonomica was founded in 1998, as a subsidiary to NetNod. The Swedish Operator Forum had for a while been discussing extending the operations of NetNod to include common infrastructure services, as well as taking on staff. It was decided that NetNod would form a separate entity for the operation of the Internet Exchange Point and that that would also be chartered to do research in Internet Technology with a main focus on DNS. Autonomica was set up with three staff, one responsible for co-ordination of the operation of the IXes and two that were moved from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. It was also agreed between the Swedish University Network SUNET, and Autonomica that Autonomica would take over the responsibility for running the i.root-servers.net. In addition to that, Autonomica was also to operate the .SE slave servers at each of the four original Netnod Exchanges.