Altair to Acquire RapidMiner, Continuing Expansion of Broad Data Analytics Portfolio

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Altair, a global leader in computational science and artificial intelligence (AI), signed a definitive agreement to acquire RapidMiner, a leader in advanced data analytics and machine learning (ML) software.

RapidMiner’s low-code platform is used by more than one million people of all skill levels to develop production-scale data pipelines and ML models, putting advanced data analytics into the hands of those who know the domain problems best. It provides hundreds of powerful, drag-and-drop building blocks to transform and augment data – greatly accelerating work for coders and non-coders alike – and its flexible delivery models provide users and enterprises with the scale they need, from a user’s desktop to on-premises servers to secure, multi-tenant cloud.

“This acquisition significantly strengthens Altair’s end-to-end data analytics (DA) portfolio, which already offers customers the power to understand, transform, act on, and automate their data,” said James R. Scapa, founder and chief executive officer, Altair. “Machine learning is becoming an essential part of business, but often the barriers to building ML models are too high to get started. Too much data, not enough data science expertise, and insecure or unscalable production environments can all keep a business from executing on their data analytics vision. That’s where RapidMiner can be transformative.”

RapidMiner’s cloud platform takes the best of RapidMiner desktop and adds the strength of the cloud, bringing additional scale and governance to the low-code platform. This multi-tenant, SaaS-ready version enables organizations to ramp up their data science workloads easily and safely.

RapidMiner resonates with users in the data analytics community due to its talented, hands-on technical team with decades of experience, led by founder and chief technology officer Dr. Ingo Mierswa, who will join Altair. Under Mierswa’s leadership, RapidMiner pioneered the entire concept of visual, explainable data science, and was the first platform to introduce automatic data science, text analytics, automated feature engineering, deep learning, and more.

“Altair and RapidMiner share the same vision to make data analytics simple enough for all users, but scalable, governed, and safe enough for all enterprises,” said Mierswa. “We see this as an incredibly exciting opportunity to watch our solutions grow across the globe and expand into a larger, more powerful ecosystem.”

RapidMiner reinforces Altair’s DA market position in several verticals – especially manufacturing and financial services – through industry expertise and industry-specific ML techniques and data source connections. Sitting next to dozens of existing Altair products already in these verticals, RapidMiner presents an exciting new offering for new and existing customers who will be able to access existing Altair and RapidMiner products easily through Altair’s unique units licensing model.

RapidMiner will be integrated with existing tools, such as Altair Knowledge Studio, Altair SmartWorks, and Altair SLC, to provide a comprehensive, code-optional, multi-language, SaaS-ready, cloud-scale platform for enterprise data analytics and data science.