The story goes back to 2004: Canadian developer Ryan Fugger was already working on a system called RipplePay, meant to let people exchange credit and value directly, without banks. The actual XRP story began in 2011, when David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto set out to build a more efficient value-transfer system.
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June 2012: the fully functioning XRP Ledger is completed and launched.
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September 2012: McCaleb, Britto, and the newly joined Chris Larsen found OpenCoin — the XRPL founders gift 80% of the pre-mined 100-billion-unit XRP supply to the company.
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September 2013: OpenCoin renames itself Ripple Labs Inc.; from 2015 it operates simply as Ripple.
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Jed McCaleb left in 2013 and founded the Stellar (XLM) project in 2014.
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Today's leadership: CEO Brad Garlinghouse, President Monica Long, CTO David Schwartz — San Francisco, ~1,120 employees, 50 countries.
Ripple (the company) and the XRP Ledger (the open, decentralized network) are not the same entity — Ripple is simply one participant building products on top of the XRPL.