James Scapa | $1B+
Get in touch with James Scapa | James Scapa, founder, chairman, and CEO of Altair, has spent four decades building the company into a global leader in simulation, high-performance computing, and data analytics. Starting Altair in 1985 with a small engineering team, Scapa helped pioneer computer-aided engineering tools that transformed product design across automotive, aerospace, manufacturing, and technology industries. Under his leadership, Altair expanded into cloud computing, AI, and enterprise analytics, evolving into a multibillion-dollar publicly traded company. Known for his long-term vision and engineering-driven culture, Scapa remains one of the most respected leaders in applied simulation and computational science.
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James Scapa left his job as a computer engineering consultant for General Motors to start Altair Engineering with two coworkers in 1985.
He has been Altair's CEO since its founding and took the company public in 2017. He owns 24% of Altair's shares.
Based in Troy, Michigan, Altair provides software in engineering simulation, high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.
Scapa grew up in New York as the son of Greek immigrant Holocaust survivors and graduated from Columbia before leaving the East Coast.
Altair Engineering Inc. is an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Troy, Michigan. It provides software and cloud solutions for simulation, IoT, high performance computing (HPC), data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI). Altair Engineering is the creator of the HyperWorks CAE software product, among numerous other software packages and suites. The company was founded in 1985 and went public in 2017. It was traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the stock ticker symbol ALTR.[2] In 2025, it was acquired by Siemens for $10.6 billion.[3][4]
History
Founding
Altair Engineering was founded in 1985 by James R. Scapa, George Christ, and Mark Kistner in Troy, Michigan. Since the company's outset,[5] Scapa has served as its CEO (and now chairman).[6] Initially, Altair started as an engineering consulting firm,[7] but branched out into product development and computer-aided engineering (CAE) software.[8] In the 1990s, it became known for its software products like HyperWorks, OptiStruct,[9] and HyperMesh,[10] which were often used for product development by the automotive industry.[11][12] Some of Altair's early clients included the Ford Motor Company, General Motors,[8] and Chrysler.[13] Its software also aided in the development of the Young America[14] and AmericaOne racing yachts,[8] the former of which was used to compete in the 1995 America's Cup.[14]
Its software also found uses in other sectors, including aerospace (NASA),[15] aviation (Airbus),[9] consumer electronics (Nokia),[15] and toy manufacturing (Mattel), among others.[8] In 2002, Altair software aided in the design of the Airbus A380 by weight optimizing the aircraft wing ribs.[9] Also in 2002, Altair opened offices in Seongnam, South Korea and Shanghai, China,[16] adding those locales to its international footprint alongside India where it had begun investment in 1992.[10]
Early 2000's and 2017 IPO
In addition to its software production, Altair hires out engineering consultants to its corporate clientele.[8] Its consultancy services accounted for the majority of the company's revenue until 2004, when the sale and licensing of software overtook that.[17] In October of that year, General Atlantic invested $30 million in Altair.[18] Also in 2004, Altair partnered with General Motors and the United States Department of Defense on the design and construction of a new military vehicle.[19]
Altair also branched out into the life sciences, finance, and pharmaceutical industries with its high performance computing software, PBS Professional,[17] which it had acquired the rights to in 2003.[20] In June 2006, Altair acquired the French CAE software company, Mecalog, and its Radioss technology suite.[17] In 2007, it spun off a new wholly owned subsidiary called ilumisys, which would focus on light-emitting diode (LED) lamps[21] designed to be used as direct replacements for fluorescent light tubes. Ilumisys' operations were moved to Michigan in 2011,[22] and it was rebranded as Toggled in 2012.[23]
In the early 2010s, Altair's product design division (Altair ProductDesign) began creating prototypes of various vehicles including a hydraulic hybrid transit bus known as BUSolution[24] and an electric concept car called the Avant GT.[25] By 2013, the company had offices in 19 countries worldwide and 1,800 employees.[26] That year, it also bought out General Atlantic's equity stake in the company.[27]
In 2016, Altair acquired Solid Iris Technologies. The company developed a photorealistic rendering and visualization tool named Thea Render. By bringing this technology in-house, additional Solid Iris rendering capabilities were added to Altairs technologies.[28][29]
On November 1, 2017, Altair went public with an IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange and began trading under the stock ticker symbol ALTR. The company raised $156 million with share prices starting at $13.[27] In the years leading up to the IPO, Altair acquired 11 different companies with strategic assets and expertise in fields like material science, electronics, industrial design, rendering, and others.[10] The company then made its products available to qualified startup companies through its Startup Program, formed in 2018 and relaunched in 2021[30][31][32].
By 2019, the company had acquired a total of 30 businesses. It also began making efforts to incorporate artificial intelligence technology into its new software packages.[6] That year, it opened a new office in Greensboro, North Carolina after acquiring the data analytics company, Datawatch, which had offices in the area.[33]
2020s
In June 2020, the company announced that it would be providing software updates for all of its products. The updates were implemented to improve workflows and provide access to a broader set of tools for data analytics, machine learning, and physics.[34] In January 2021, Altair announced that it would collaborate with Rolls-Royce Holdings on a project using AI and machine learning to improve the aero jet engine design process.[35] In November 2021, Altair's PBS Professional workload manager was selected by the Argonne National Laboratory to be used across the organization's high performance computing (HPC) systems, including the Polaris and Aurora supercomputers.[36] That same month, Altair was also included on Inc. Magazine's 2021 Best-Led Companies list.[37] In December, Altair was named as one of Investor's Business Daily's Best 100 ESG Companies.[38]
In March 2023, Altair rebranded its AI and data analytics product now known as Altair RapidMiner.[39] In April 2023, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a favorable ruling affirming the dismissal in the copyright infringement case SAS Institute Inc. v. World Programming Ltd. pertaining to SAS software.[40] In October 2023, Altair acquired OmniQuest, a software company out of Novi, Michigan, to further its optimization technology.[41]
On October 30, 2024, Altair announced its agreement to be acquired by Siemens.[42] The acquisition was finalized in March 2025, with Altair integrated into the Siemens Digital Industries division.[43] Following the acquisition, Altair's technologies were integrated into Siemens' Xcelerator portfolio to enhance AI-driven industrial software offerings.[3]
Corporate acquisitions
Altair has made 34 acquisitions since its founding. [45] The following is a list of selected corporate acquisitions:
Year Company Business type Location Ref.
2006 Mecalog Group CAE software Antony, France [17]
2008 solidThinking Industrial design software Vicenza, Italy [46]
2010 SimLab Corporation Feature-based modeling technology Rancho Santa Margarita, California [47]
2011 Acusim Software, Inc. Computational fluid dynamics technology Mountain View, California [48][49]
2014 EM Software & Systems (EMSS) Electromagnetic technology software Stellenbosch, South Africa [50]
2014 Visual Solutions, Inc. Mathematical modeling, simulation, and model-based embedded system development Westford, Massachusetts [51]
2016 CEDRAT S.A. Low frequency electromagnetics simulations for electric motor design Grenoble, France [52]
2016 Magsoft Corporation (CEDRAT subsidiary) New York [52]
2017 MODELiiS Electronic design automation (EDA) technology Grenoble, France [53]
2017 Runtime Design Automation High performance computing Santa Clara, California [54]
2017 Carriots S.L. IoT application enablement platform (AEP) Madrid, Spain [55]
2017 Componeering Inc. Composite structural analysis and design technology Helsinki, Finland [56]
2018 TES International Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology Michigan [57]
2018 SimSolid Structural analysis simulation Mississauga, Ontario, Canada [58]
2018 Datawatch Corporation Data analytics technology Bedford, Massachusetts [59]
2018 FluiDyna GmbH NVIDIA CUDA and GPU-based Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and numerical simulation technologies Munich, Germany [60]
2018 CANDI Controls, Inc. (Intellectual Property Assets) Cloud-based SaaS; platform connects edge gateway computers to IoT devices Oakland, California [61][62]
2019 Polliwog Co. EDA technology Seoul, South Korea [63]
2019 SEAM Software (from Cambridge Collaborative) Noise and vibration predictive technology Concord, Massachusetts [64]
2019 DEM Solutions Discrete Element Method software used for the simulation and bulk and granular material Edinburgh, UK [65]
2019 newFASANT Computational and high-frequency electromagnetics Alcala de Henares, Spain [66]
2020 WRAP Software (from WRAP International) Spectrum management and radio network planning Sweden [67]
2020 S&Wise Co., Ltd. Polyurethane foam processing solution Seoul, South Korea [68]
2020 Univa Workload management, scheduling, HPC, and AI Hoffman Estates, Illinois [69]
2020 M-Base Engineering + Software GmbH Supplier of material database and material information systems Aachen, Germany [70]
2020 Ellexus Input/Output (I/O) analysis tool Cambridge, England [71][72]
2021 Flow Simulator (from GE Aviation) Flow, heat transfer, and combustion design software Evendale, Ohio [73]
2021 S-FRAME Software Structural analysis and design software British Columbia, Canada [74]
2021 World Programming Data Science and Data Engineering Specializing in Analytics Hampshire, United Kingdom [75]
2022 Cassini Next-gen cloud native technology for Industry 4.0 Hyderabad, India [76]
2022 Powersim Simulation and design tools for power electronics Rockville, Maryland [77]
2022 Gen3D Additive manufacturing design software Bath, England [78]
2022 Concept Engineering Electronic system visualization software Freiburg, Germany [79]
2022 RapidMiner Data science Data Analytics and AI platform Dortmund, Germany [80]
2023 OmniV Digital Engineering UK [81]
2024 Cambridge Semantics Knowledge graph technology Boston, MA [82]
2024 Research in Flight Computational fluid dynamics software Auburn, AL [83]
2024 Metrics Design Automation A simulation as a service (SaaS) business model for semiconductor electronic functional simulation and design verification Ottawa [84]
2024 KSK Analytics Consulting and training in artificial intelligence and data analytics
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