It was a company almost from the start. In the mid 90s Tatu Ylonen created ssh v1 and released it as freeware, then shortly afterwards apparently he regretted it and created ssh v2, made it proprietary and commercialized it with his company.
In the late 90s some OpenBSD guys then forked the unencumbered ssh v1 source to create OpenSSH and implemented ssh v2 with it and their ssh version eventually gained traction and became dominant.