Capital One, Comcast, Nordstrom and Vodafone all ran marketing campaigns on software from a company in Waltham, Massachusetts. Unica sold what it called enterprise marketing management: tools to pick the right customers, send the right offer and measure what came back. About 300 companies used it by 2005. Marketing was shifting from gut feel to data, and Unica wanted to be the system of record for that change.

Consulting to Pay for Code

Unica was incorporated in December 1992, and co-founder Yuchun Lee became its chief executive. In its early years the company took on consulting work to fund development of data-mining and analytics software. That work grew into the Affinium suite for campaign management, marketing resource management and web analytics. The bet was that marketers would want the same rigor finance teams had, with every dollar traced to a result.

Ten Dollars, Then IBM

Unica priced at $10 a share in August 2005 and listed on the Nasdaq National Market under the symbol UNCA. Lee owned about 27.8 percent of the stock after the offering. Five years later IBM agreed to buy Unica for $21 a share in cash, about $480 million. The deal closed in October 2010, and Unica became part of IBM's software group.

Cover: The Unicorn Purifying a Source, Jean Duvet. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a unicorn (Unica).