In the early 2000s, Roger Dingledine, a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate, began working on an NRL onion routing project with Paul Syverson. This is still a simple explanation for how Tor works today. The goal of onion routing was to have a way to use the internet with as much privacy as possible, and the idea was to route traffic through multiple servers and encrypt it each step of the way. Their answer was to create and deploy the first research designs and prototypes of onion routing. Naval Research Lab (NRL) asked themselves if there was a way to create internet connections that don't reveal who is talking to whom, even to someone monitoring the network. In the 1990s, the lack of security on the internet and its ability to be used for tracking and surveillance was becoming clear, and in 1995, David Goldschlag, Mike Reed, and Paul Syverson at the U.S. But all of the people who have been involved in Tor are united by a common belief: internet users should have private access to an uncensored web. Just like Tor users, the developers, researchers, and founders who've made Tor possible are a diverse group of people.

The Tor Project, Inc, became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2006, but the idea of 'onion routing' began in the mid 1990s.

Who develops the tor project