WhatsApp was sold to FaceBook in 2014 for $19B and I believe this was split between the two founders, so each made almost $10B off of a single app.
Youngest daughter used to work there. Their campus in Madison is SICK!
Not quite obscure enough. Nearly all medical administrators, IT personnel, and lots of other personnel use the software and are pretty clear on what it does.
On the flip side, The valuation of the company varies, $3.something billion is at the low end.
Less well known but more widely used is Intersystems Cache database system. Epic Systems software is built on it but the end users mostly don’t know that. It has plenty of other customers world-wide medical, financial, and government systems among more specialized users. It’s also a privately owned company valued at several billion bucks.
Mark Cuban got 5.7B from yahoo for broadcast.com in 1999. not sure if that passes the obscure test, but i sure didn’t know about it
I think that’s a letter of the law kind of thing, not a spirit of the law.
Cuban got extraordinarily, stupdendously, colossally lucky in selling out to Yahoo! at nearly the absolute height of the Internet bubble. There was no indication that broadcast.com was worth anywhere near what he got for it(it had consistently lost money prior to the sale, for one thing).
Yahoo just rolled it into their services, and eventually just sunset it.
But he didn’t get actual cash, but rather Yahoo stock. With restrictions on him selling it. That became worth a lot less when the dot.com bubble burst, and Yahoo stock went way down.
Meanwhile Christopher Jaeb, the original founder (as AudioNet), had sold to Cuban for ‘only’ $50 million.
ISTR that the sale was for 5.7 billion in stock, but Cuban’s part when he sold it was only about 1 billion.
One possible candidate might be the development of the early RISC computers created by ACORN. Was it hardware? software? both?
There is a direct line from their early work in the early-mid 80’s to the architecture now used in billions of mobile phones and devices. They became ARM and utterly massive.
That’s definitely in the running for most influential, but did the ACORN guys become ludicrously rich as a result? Quick googling says they are definitely wealthy, but not Internet mogul wealthy.
Ridiculous wealth? probably not but interesting guys in pivotal roles during the era of real micro explosion.
The BBC did an intriguing program about that period called “Micro Men” which was fun, also I’d highly recommend Francis Spufford’s “Backroom Boys”. It is about the charming way that some key British tech and engineering projects were carried out. The chapter “the universe in a bottle” covers the development of the game “Elite” and Acorn plus Hauser/Curry et al are obviously featured heavily.
Despite what Wikipedia says, it’s:
Im Jahr 1972 gründen fünf ehemalige IBM-Mitarbeiter das Unternehmen „SAP Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung“.
And many who’ve heard of it and work with it wish they haven’t.
I have it on good authority that it actually stands for Suck All Profits.
(Also that Colgate is just the toothpaste division of SAP) 
I did. I always “buy” freeware if I use it a lot. It’s the right thing to do.
The recent rise of ARM is incredibly interesting to me. The fact that ARM is a massive threat to Intel a solid 25+ years after that war was largely considered over is fascinating.
It’s easier to picture a world ten years from now without Intel than a world without ARM, and that’s bonkers.
Is a website unique “software”?
“Just”. It’s the benchmark ERP; R/3 and S/4 (their flagship products) are among the few ERPs which are actually integrated and not a bunch of different programs yelling to each other.
As a company, SAP is a bit like BASF: not that known to people who have no contact with their specific industry but their logo is actually in a lot of places (including, yes, yachts) and if you’re in that industry you definitely know who they are. Lots of people use their software daily without realizing they do: for them it’s just “the computer”.
I’ll take a guess and say Qualcomm’s spread spectrum stuff is the least well known software that made the most money. But Qualcomm’s value is partly hardware as well.
The answer may also lie in vertical markets. Manufacturing, finance, retail… There is software out there that has massive sales and no one other than factory managers or engineers has ever heard of it. Some of it comes from very small companies. In my field we sold factory automation, control, and efficiency software. The market is worth billions per year. Lots of people started software packages then sold out for big bucks to large companies like GE or Siemens.
Another candidate might be the original spreadsheet, or perhaps Lotus 123. But while it is obscure now, it sure wasn’t back in the day.
AutoCad was written by a couple of guys, and it’s been huge for decades.
I just remembered Daylight Chemical Information Systems and their cheminformatics packages. They are a very small company, but their tools got picked up by some very big players and made them a lot of money.
Taking the thread title and this line “Can you identify computer programs/applications that might be less readily familiar to non-techies, but generated tremendous wealth?” from the OP literally it would have to do doubt be 86-DOS (aka QDOS). The MS-DOS predecessor that MS bought rights to off a small time company to present to IBM as “their” OS for the new IBM PC.
Billions ensued. But not for the little company. A place called Seattle Computer Products.