Altair gets further into EDA, acquiring Polliwog

It’s early early in Detroit (the sun’s not even glimmer on the horizon) and we’re already seeing news come out of Altair’s Technology Conference –its annual user event– that, I’m sure we’ll learn a lot more about as the day goes on. Anyway,

Altair announced that it entered into a stock purchase agreement on October 7, 2019 to acquire Polliwog Co., Ltd., a privately-held, Korean maker of electronic design automation (EDA) software and hardware, including the UDE Platform and products marketed under the PollEx name (PollEx PCB products, PollEx Logic, PollEx CAM, PollEx Cross Probe, PollEx BOM, PollEx Metal Mask Manager, PollEx JIG Generator and Pollex UPE).

Altair is paying $10.7 million in cash now for 97% of outstanding shares, and has agreed to purchase the remaining 3% for $300,000 in 2022. In addition, Altair will use 474,000 of its class A stock in the purchase. At today’s price, $33.88/share, that brings the total price paid to something like $27 million.

I know nothing about Polliwog (though I love the whimsicality of the name) but expect to learn a lot more over the next 2 days. Altair has acquired other EDA brands, notably MODELiiS, a French supplier of software for circuit modeling, system design and simulation tools that now forms a base for its IoT sensor modeling tools. How Polliwog fits into it all will, I’m sure, be part of Altair CEO Jim Scapa’s keynote in a few hours.