After leaving Ethereum in 2016, Gavin Wood, one of its co-founders, went to work on a relatively simple sharding of the network, launching it in October of that same year.
Following that move, Wood teamed up with Peter Czaban of Parity Technologies and founded the Web3 Foundation (W3F) in 2017, a space that oversees Polkadot's research and development.
Despite being launched more than 4 years ago, the Polkadot project is still in constant development.