A drug company can sell the same pill at dozens of prices, after rebates to insurers, chargebacks to wholesalers, and discounts the government requires. Model N built software to keep track of all of it. Its customers included Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Amgen, Dell and VMware. In March 2013, as cloud software stocks were in demand, Model N went public as the system of record for the money that slipped between a list price and a real one.

From NetDynamics to Rebates

Zack Rinat founded Model N in December 1999. He had co-founded NetDynamics, an application software company that Sun Microsystems bought. Model N's first product suite, released in 2002, served medical device makers. It later expanded to pharmaceutical and biotech companies and then to semiconductor and high-tech firms. The software managed pricing, contracts, incentives and rebates, and it could run on a customer's own servers or in the cloud.

Vista Pays Thirty

Model N priced its IPO at $15.50 a share in March 2013 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as MODN. It spent the next years moving customers from licenses to cloud subscriptions. In 2024 Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm that buys software companies, agreed to pay $30 a share in cash. The deal closed that June, and Model N left the stock market.

Cover: S. P. Peck Apothecary, Unknown. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an old apothecary shop (pharmaceutical pricing).