Siemens acquires Altair Engineering

Siemens has signed an agreement to acquire Altair Engineering Inc., a provider of software in the industrial simulation and analysis market. With this acquisition, Siemens strengthens its position as a leading technology company and its leadership in industrial software.

“Acquiring Altair marks a significant milestone for Siemens. This strategic investment aligns with our commitment to accelerate the digital and sustainability transformations of our customers by combining the real and digital worlds. The addition of Altair’s capabilities in simulation, high performance computing, data science, and artificial intelligence [AI] together with Siemens Xcelerator will create the world's most complete AI-powered design and simulation portfolio,” said Roland Busch, president and CEO of Siemens AG. “It is a logical next step: we have been building our leadership in industrial software for the last 15 years, most recently, democratizing the benefits of data and AI for entire industries.”

“This acquisition represents the culmination of nearly 40 years in which Altair has grown from a startup in Detroit to a world-class software and technology company. We have added thousands of customers globally in manufacturing, life sciences, energy and financial services, and built an amazing workforce, and innovative culture,” said James Scapa, Altair’s founder and CEO. “We believe this combination of two strongly complementary leaders in the engineering software space brings together Altair’s broad portfolio in simulation, data science, and HPC [high performance computing] with Siemens’ strong position in mechanical and EDA design. Siemens’ outstanding technology, strategic customer relationships, and honest, technical culture is an excellent fit for Altair to continue its journey driving innovation with computational intelligence.”

By adding Altair’s highly complementary simulation portfolio, with strength in mechanical and electromagnetic capabilities, Siemens is enhancing its comprehensive Digital Twin to deliver a full-suite, physics-based, simulation portfolio as part of Siemens Xcelerator. Altair's data science and AI-powered simulation capabilities allow anyone, from engineers to generalists, to access simulation expertise to decrease time-to-market and accelerate design iterations. Additionally, Altair's data science capabilities will unlock Siemens' industrial domain expertise in product lifecycle and manufacturing processes.

Siemens expects to achieve significant revenue synergies especially from cross-selling of the highly complementary portfolios and from providing Altair full access to Siemens's global footprint and global industrial enterprise and customer base.

Founded in 1985, Altair Engineering Inc. went public in 2017 (Nasdaq) and is headquartered in Troy, Michigan. Out of its more than 3,500 employees, approximately 1,400 employees work in R&D.