A drug maker signs thousands of contracts with wholesalers, hospitals, pharmacies and insurers, each with its own rebates and price terms. Tracking all of it on spreadsheets led to errors and lost money. I-many built software to manage those contracts and work out what was owed. It went public in July 2000, while business software was still hot. Investors saw contract software as a fast-growing niche.

Rebates Paid Only Once

I-many bet that contract management in health care was complex enough to need its own software. Its products tracked prices, rebates and compliance across many trading partners. Its customers were mainly pharmaceutical and life sciences firms. The tools found money clients were owed and stopped them from paying rebates twice. That made the value easy for finance teams to measure. The company later tried to widen its market to other industries.

Bidding Up a Penny Stock

I-many priced its IPO at $9 a share in July 2000 and listed on Nasdaq as IMNY. Growth slowed after the dot-com crash, and the company posted repeated losses. It kept a loyal base of drug-industry customers. In 2009 the private equity firm LLR Partners agreed to buy it for $0.43 a share. A rival bidder pushed the price up to $0.61, and the deal was valued at about $55 million.

Cover: Flock of Sheep at the Edge of a Wood, Charles Émile Jacque. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a flock of sheep (many).