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A $375 million acquisition does not always come with a household name attached, and this one is no exception. Simulations Plus, Inc. (NASDAQ: SLP) announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Altaris, LLC, a New York-based private equity firm focused exclusively on healthcare, in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $375 million. The price: $18.50 per share, representing a 26% premium to the company’s 60-day volume-weighted average price as of June 15, 2026. The deal was unanimously approved by the Simulations Plus board of directors.
The premium itself is worth pausing on. A 26% bump over a 60-day volume-weighted average price is a more demanding benchmark than a single-day closing price. It signals that Altaris was not simply exploiting a momentary dip. It paid a real strategic premium for a company it clearly wanted badly enough to price accordingly.
So what does Simulations Plus actually do? The company develops and licenses AI-driven modeling software used by pharmaceutical and biotechnology researchers to predict how drug compounds will behave inside the human body, before anyone runs a single lab experiment. Its two flagship products, GastroPlus and ADMET Predictor, simulate gastrointestinal absorption, pharmacokinetics, and toxicity properties. In plain terms, these tools help scientists figure out whether a drug candidate will work, and whether it will be safe, without spending years and millions of dollars on physical testing. Regulatory agencies and major pharmaceutical companies worldwide rely on them.
That is the kind of software that tends to be quiet until it is gone. Once a research organization builds its workflows around a platform like GastroPlus, switching costs become enormous. These are not tools researchers evaluate casually. They are infrastructure.
Altaris is not simply buying Simulations Plus and leaving it on its own. The firm intends to combine it with Chemical Computing Group, an existing Altaris portfolio company and the maker of the Molecular Operating Environment platform, a molecular design software suite used across the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors. The two companies together would form a more complete computational drug discovery software stack, covering everything from molecular design through absorption and toxicity modeling. That combination directly challenges Schrödinger, Inc. (NASDAQ: SDGR), which has built a reputation as the premium player in physics-based computational drug discovery software, though at a significantly higher price point.
The transaction is financed through a combination of committed equity and debt, and is not subject to a financing contingency. Simulations Plus co-founder and director Dr. Walter Woltosz has entered into a voting and support agreement with Altaris, committing to vote his shares in favor of the deal. The company’s headquarters in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina is expected to remain in place after closing. Once the transaction closes, Simulations Plus will become a privately held subsidiary of Altaris and will be delisted from the Nasdaq. Closing is expected in the fourth quarter of 2026, pending shareholder approval and regulatory clearance.
The broader takeaway here is one that tends to surface in deals like this. The most acquirable software companies are rarely the ones making headlines. They are the ones scientists and researchers have quietly built their entire workflows around, the tools so deeply embedded in daily operations that nobody stops to wonder whether they could be replaced. Simulations Plus built that kind of product, and Altaris recognized it. The $375 million price tag is the market’s acknowledgment of what that kind of indispensability is actually worth.
