Nope, Quad9 was not started by IBM. It was an internal project of PCH, started in 2014 in response first to European privacy regulators who were being lobbied by Google for a one-off exemption for 8.8.8.8 in the run-up to GDPR implementation; then in 2015 a number of cybersecurity organizations were contacting us to do another (we'd built several global recursive resolvers before, while nobody else had done more than one, so it was reasonable for people to be coming to us for more) that did malware/phishing/tracking blocking. Since if we did two separate ones, people would have to choose between privacy and security, we decided to just roll the two projects into one. Because it was public-facing, in 2016 we spun it out into its own separate non-profit originally called "CleanerDNS." From past experience, we knew that a memorable IP address was crucial. We were working with APNIC, and they got us a good v6 address, but then, depending on your mood, we were either sincerely flattered, or tortious interference happened, and so we had to try for other of the other easy-to-remember ones. My friend Jeff Jonas was, at that time, an SVP at IBM, and stepped up and got us 9.9.9.0/24. That process started in July of 2017 and IBM's sponsorship wasn't publicly announced until November of 2017.