Kotlin was developed by JetBrains in 2010. They initially released it under the name Project Kotlin in July 2011. They needed a language that was concise, elegant, expressive, and also interoperable with Java, as most of their products were developed in Java, including the Intellij Idea. They were looking for an alternate language to reduce the amount of boilerplate code required and to introduce new constructs, such as higher-order functions, to make language more expressive and concise. One of the goals of the Kotlin language was to be able to compile code as quickly as Java.

JetBrains open-sourced the project under the Apache 2 license in February 2012. Kotlin v1.0 was released on February 15, 2016. This was the first official stable release from JetBrains. Kotlin v1.2 was released on November 28, 2017. This release added a feature to allow code to be shared between JVM and JavaScript platforms.