Qlik was born in Lund, a Swedish university town, and grew up in suburban Philadelphia. Its product, QlikView, loaded a company's data into memory so a manager could click on a region or a product and see every related number change at once. Older business intelligence tools needed specialists to build each report. When Qlik went public in July 2010, the market was still shaky from the financial crisis, and tech IPOs were rare.

Click, and the Numbers Follow

Björn Berg and Staffan Gestrelius founded the company in Sweden in 1993. Its software kept data in a computer's memory and linked every field to every other, so a user could explore instead of asking a fixed question. Qlik sold to the department first, often to a sales or finance team, and then spread across the company. It moved its headquarters to Radnor, Pennsylvania, to chase the American market.

A Bright Week in a Gray Year

Qlik priced at $10 a share in July 2010, above its expected range, and listed on Nasdaq as QLIK. It raised $112 million, and the shares rose about 28 percent on the first day. CEO Lars Björk rang the opening bell. Qlik grew for years but faced Tableau and cheaper cloud tools. In 2016 Thoma Bravo took it private for about $3 billion, and Qlik remains privately held.

Cover: Carl Larsson, Anders Zorn. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a Swedish etching (Qlik's Swedish roots).