The idea for the QuTip project was conceived in 2010 by PhD student Paul Nation, who was using the quantum optics toolbox for MATLAB in his research. According to Paul Nation, he wanted to create a python package similar to qotoolbox because he "was not a big fan of MATLAB" and then decided to "just write it [him]self". As a postdoctoral fellow, at the RIKEN Institute in Japan, he met Robert Johansson and the two worked together on the package. In contrast to its predecessor qotoolbox, which relies on the proprietary MATLAB environment, it was published in 2012 under an open source license.