It all started in 1998 from an idea to enhance the understanding of world health. The founders of Gapminder developed prototype software showing time series of health statistics as moving graphics and varying life conditions as 360° photo panoramas from homes, schools and health facilities. From the prototype emerged the Dollar Street project with Save the Children Fund in Sweden and the World Health Chart project with WHO.

Following the later project Gapminder developed the software Trendalyzer that turns boring time series of development statistics into attractive moving graphics. Collaboration with United Nations Division of Statistic and UNDP, started in 2003 with the aim to visualize the fulfilment of millennium development goals with a World Development Chart 2003 powered by a Trendalyzer version that was written in Macromedia Director and required download and installation.

In 2004 and 2005 Trendalyzer was rewritten in Flash to enable the use of moving graphics ´directly on web pages. The continuation during the fall of 2005 and 2006 was done in collaboration with UN Statistic Division. By January 2006 Gapminder had also developed a prototype for Search of time series in linked databases. This search function was hence rewritten and improved by UNSD and is being launched as UNdata by the end of 2007. The Trendalyzer package was further developed by Gapminder during 2006, launched in a beta test version as Gapminder World in May 2006.

In March 2007 Trendalyzer was acquired by Google with the intention to scale it up and meanwhile Gapminder Foundation continues to use available versions for making GapCasts, i.e. videos with animated statistical story-telling and for further provision of data in Gapminder World.