Stellar was founded in July 2014 by Jed McCaleb — who had previously created the eDonkey file-sharing network and the Mt. Gox exchange, and was a co-founder of Ripple/XRP — together with lawyer/venture capitalist Joyce Kim. McCaleb left Ripple in 2013 over disagreements with his co-founders, wanting to build a non-profit, more inclusive alternative to Ripple's bank-focused, for-profit model.
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July 31, 2014: the project is announced in the “Introducing Stellar” blog post — development is carried out by the non-profit Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), which controls the initial total supply of roughly 105 billion XLM.
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Stripe (the payments company led by Patrick Collison) helped launch the SDF with a $3 million investment.
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Initially built on the Ripple codebase, the network later adopted its own Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), designed by David Mazières (a Stanford professor, later SDF's chief scientist) — this became the basis for the independent network, which launched with its genesis block on September 30, 2015.
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Joyce Kim served as SDF's executive director until May 2016, after which she left the project.
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2019: the SDF burned roughly half of total supply (55+ billion XLM) — a controversial move, but no new XLM has been issued since, resulting in a fixed supply.
Important distinction: XRP (Ripple) and XLM (Stellar) are two philosophically opposite projects from the same founder (Jed McCaleb) — Ripple a for-profit corporate model sold to banks, Stellar a non-profit alternative focused on financial inclusion.