He had heard that the local workstation vendor Apollo Computer was looking for a database offering on their Unix machines, and they agreed to fund development. With their encouragement he formed Groton Database Systems (named after the town, Groton, Massachusetts, where they were located) on Labor Day 1984 and started work on what would eventually be released as InterBase. In 1986 Apollo suffered a corporate shakeup and decided to exit the software business, but by this time the product was making money.