Spyglass
The company that licensed Mosaic to Microsoft and watched it become Internet Explorer – for free.
Spyglass was founded in 1990 in Champaign, Illinois, to commercialise University of Illinois technology, and in 1994 obtained the rights to license the university's Mosaic browser. That same year Microsoft signed up: a flat fee plus a share of revenue. Internet Explorer 1.0 was built on Spyglass code, and its About box said "Based on NCSA Mosaic" for years.
The catch was that Microsoft gave the browser away with Windows, so the revenue share came to roughly nothing. Spyglass negotiated an $8 million settlement in 1997, pivoted to embedded systems and was acquired by OpenTV in 2000. A lesson in reading the contract's definition of "revenue".