MuleSoft took its name from donkey work. Its founder, Ross Mason, was tired of the grinding job of wiring one business system to another, and he wrote open-source software to carry that load. Large companies ran hundreds of apps that could not talk to each other. MuleSoft sold them a way to connect everything through APIs. It went public in March 2017, as cloud software companies were selling for record prices.

Named for the Grunt Work

Ross Mason started the Mule open-source project and founded the company in 2006. It was first called MuleSource. The bet was that every company would end up with a tangle of old databases and new cloud apps. MuleSoft's Anypoint Platform let developers build reusable connections, or APIs, between them. Banks, retailers, and governments bought it. The free open-source version brought in developers, and the paid platform brought in revenue.

A Year on the NYSE

MuleSoft priced at $17 a share on March 16, 2017, raising $221 million. It closed its first day on the New York Stock Exchange at $24.75, up 46 percent. Salesforce wanted the plumbing behind its own products. In March 2018 it agreed to buy MuleSoft for about $6.5 billion, and the deal closed that May. MuleSoft now runs as a Salesforce product line.

Cover: Mule Driver, Mariano Fortuny y Marsal. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a mule driver (the beast that carries data).