Parvis had been founded in Bochum, Germany in 1999 as a spin-off of the International Tandem Network. The company relocated to the United States in 2001 and was based in Livingston, Montana. The Parvis Team had been bringing eTandem partners together since 1994 at the Tandem Agency of the International Tandem Network. The NSF Phase I project received headed up by a Montana native was designed to evaluate developing language proficiency through distance-learning partnerships via the Internet.