Sounds familiar to me. I started the Selenium project (original version was written in JS), started a company around it (Sauce Labs). Browser vendors implemented the Selenium WebDriver protocol, and now it's a W3C standard for browser automation. So, yeah.

(Note: Massive generalization of the project history though, including the part where I and other key project members worked at the browser vendors at various times. Having insiders at the browser vendors does massively help move a standard forward.)