Altair Engineering (ALTR) 10-K2020 FY Annual report

UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

FORM 10-K

(Mark One)

For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020

or

For the transition period from __________________ to __________________

Commission file number 001-38263

ALTAIR ENGINEERING INC.

(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)

248-614-2400

(Registrant’s telephone number, including area code)

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act:

None

(Title of class)

Indicate by a check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act.    Yes  ☒    No  ☐

Indicate by a check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d) of the Act.    Yes  ☐    No  ☒

Indicate by a check mark whether the registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days.    Yes  ☒    No  ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit such files).    Yes  ☒    No  ☐

Indicate by a check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, a smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company,” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.  

If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report. ☒

Indicate by a check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Act).    Yes  ☐    No  ☒

The aggregate market value of the voting and non-voting common stock held by non-affiliates of the registrant, based upon the closing sale price of a share of the registrant’s Class A common stock on June 30, 2020, the last business day of the registrant’s most recently completed second fiscal quarter, as reported on the NASDAQ stock market, was $1.6 billion. Shares of the registrant’s Class A common stock and Class B common stock held by each executive officer, director, and each other person who may be deemed to be an affiliate of the registrant, have been excluded from this computation. This determination of affiliate status is not necessarily a conclusive determination for other purposes.

On February 12, 2021, there were 44,757,500 shares of the registrant’s Class A common stock outstanding and 29,840,732 shares of the registrant’s Class B common stock outstanding.

Documents Incorporated By Reference:

Portions of the registrant’s Proxy Statement relating to the 2021 Annual Meeting of Stockholders, scheduled to be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission within 120 days after the end of the registrant’s fiscal year ended December 31, 2020, are incorporated by reference into Part III of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

ALTAIR ENGINEERING INC.

Annual Report on Form 10-K for the Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2020

Table of Contents

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CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This annual report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 under Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Forward-looking statements include statements with respect to our beliefs, plans, objectives, goals, expectations, anticipations, assumptions, estimates, intentions and future performance, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may be beyond our control, and which may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be forward-looking statements. You can identify these forward-looking statements through our use of words such as “may,” “can,” “anticipate,” “assume,” “should,” “indicate,” “would,” “believe,” “contemplate,” “expect,” “seek,” “estimate,” “continue,” “plan,” “point to,” “project,” “predict,” “could,” “intend,” “target,” “potential” and other similar words and expressions of the future.

There are a number of important factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those expressed in any forward-looking statement made by us. These factors include, but are not limited to:

The foregoing does not represent an exhaustive list of matters that may be covered by the forward-looking statements contained herein or risk factors that we are faced with that may cause our actual results to differ from those anticipated in our forward-looking statements. Please see “Risk factors” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K under Part I, Item 1A, for additional risks which could adversely impact our business and financial performance.

All forward-looking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary notice. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this report or the date of the document incorporated by reference into this report. We have no obligation, and expressly disclaim any obligation, to update, revise or correct any of the forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. We have expressed our expectations, beliefs and projections in good faith, and we believe they have a reasonable basis. However, we cannot assure you that our expectations, beliefs or projections will result or be achieved or accomplished.

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PART I

Item 1. Business

General

Altair Engineering Inc. (“Altair,” the “Company,” “we,” “us” or “our”) is a global technology company providing software and cloud solutions in the areas of simulation, high-performance computing (HPC), data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI). We enable organizations across broad industry segments to compete more effectively in a connected world while creating a more sustainable future.

Throughout this document we refer to AI as a term to encompass sub-disciplines including data analytics, data science, data preparation, and machine learning. Altair has been incorporating AI technologies into our products for several years and we believe the evolving broad use of the term is appropriate for our product offerings, customer applications, and market opportunities.

Our simulation and AI-driven approach to innovation is powered by our broad portfolio of high-fidelity and high-performance physics solvers, our market leading technology for optimization and HPC, and our end-to-end platform for developing AI and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. Our integrated suite of software optimizes design performance across multiple disciplines encompassing structures, motion, fluids, thermal, electromagnetics, system modeling, and embedded systems, while also providing AI solutions and true-to-life visualization and rendering. Our HPC solutions maximize the efficient utilization of complex compute resources and streamline the workflow management of compute-intensive tasks for applications including AI, modeling and simulation, and visualization. Our data analytics, AI, and IoT products include data preparation, data science, MLOps, orchestration, and visualization solutions that fuel engineering, scientific, and business decisions.

We believe a critical component of our success has been our company culture, based on our core values of innovation, envisioning the future, communicating honestly and broadly, seeking technology and business firsts, and embracing diversity. This culture is important because it helps attract and retain top people, encourages innovation and teamwork, and enhances our focus on achieving Altair’s corporate objectives.

Products

Rising expectations of end-market customers are expanding the use of advanced simulation, data analytics, and AI across many industry verticals. Altair’s thirty-six year heritage is in solving some of the most challenging problems faced by engineers and scientists.  

Altair is a leading provider of simulation software enabling customers to enhance product performance, compress development time, and reduce costs. We believe we are unique in the industry for the depth and breadth of our engineering application software offerings combined with our domain expertise and proprietary technology for harnessing HPC, cloud infrastructures, and AI technology.  

Our high-performance and cloud computing workload and workflow tools empower customers to explore designs and analyze data in ways not possible in traditional computing environments. Our customers include universities, government agencies, manufacturers, pharmaceutical firms, Banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI), weather prediction agencies, and electronics design companies.

We are a leading provider of low-code AI technology for data preparation, data science, MLops, data management, and visualization. BFSI customers as well as finance departments in various industries including manufacturing, retail, and life sciences use our software to capture disparate data streams and apply analytics to make more informed business decisions.

Software Products

Altair’s software products represent a comprehensive, open architecture solution for simulation, HPC, data analytics, and AI to empower decision making for improved product design and development, manufacturing, energy management and exploration, financial services, health care, and retail operations. We believe Altair’s solutions are compelling due to their openness and usability.

Altair’s products offer a comprehensive set of technologies to design and optimize high performance, efficient, innovative, and sustainable products and processes in an increasingly connected world. Our products are categorized by:

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Physics Simulation and Concept Design

At the core of Altair’s simulation software portfolios are mathematical software “solvers” that use advanced computational algorithms to predict physical performance. Optimization leverages these solvers to derive the most efficient solutions to meet desired complex multi-objective requirements.

Altair’s solvers are a comprehensive set of fast, scalable and reliable physics algorithms for complex problems in linear and non-linear mechanics, fluid dynamics, electromagnetics, motion, discrete elements, systems and manufacturing simulation.

 We invest continuously to improve the speed and accuracy of our solvers. Altair’s solvers are now engaging GPU technology to accelerate solution times. Two of our products in the area of fluid mechanics, ultraFluidX (external aerodynamics) and nanoFluidX (machinery lubrication), were developed from the ground up to leverage GPUs and deliver significant performance advantages versus the competition.

We believe the breakthrough technology of SimSolid is game-changing and delivers extremely easy to model, fast, and accurate simulation results for complex designs versus the competition. SimSolid is especially relevant for simulation-driven design and seeing rapid adoption in many customer environments.

Altair’s optimization technology combined with superior multi-physics and multi-domain simulation is a key differentiator and spans our product offering. We believe customers using our technologies gain a sustainable competitive advantage by developing better products in less time.

Altair’s design, modeling, and visualization tools allow for advanced physics attributes to be modeled and rendered on top of object geometry in high fidelity. These tools are becoming more user friendly, design-centric and relevant earlier in the development process.

Addressing the large market of designers, design engineers, and manufacturing engineers who are not experts in simulation is important toward increasing the use of simulation in design processes. Altair has several technologies focused on this market, including Inspire and SimSolid for mechanical design and Pollex for electronic systems and printed circuit board design.

Our industrial and concept design tools generate early concepts to address requirements for ergonomics, aesthetics, performance, manufacturing feasibility, and cost. These tools are all driven by simulation and machine learning algorithms. We believe these products are emerging as a market force with the potential to eclipse traditional computer-aided design (CAD) in both the mechanical and electronics worlds.

Models are increasingly required to deliver performance across a range of physics, including mechanical systems, communication and control, printed circuit boards, and combinations of these at various levels of fidelity. Altair’s math and system design tools help engineers to quickly explore requirements and performance throughout the design process.

We believe Altair’s solutions are compelling due to their openness and usability, and their ability to develop signal-based controls, mixed physics models, and electronics all within one environment and at varying levels of fidelity to support decision making in each stage of a product’s lifecycle. For example, our multi-disciplinary models may include mechanics, fluids, electronics, and software among other technical elements, and encompass a scope of products ranging from components to IoT-enabled “systems of systems”. By employing varying degrees of fidelity, we aid the modeling process where computational requirements or data availability might otherwise prove to be obstacles.

A key strength to Altair’s math and systems solutions is allowing development organizations to move seamlessly in this multi-discipline, multi-component, multi-detail space while integrating models from various authoring tools. With a broad range of multi-physics solvers based on an open-system approach, a strong set of model reduction techniques can be employed toward IoT-enabled product development which can then be carried forward into device management and application development.

We believe Altair’s tools for simulation of communications and control, data analytics, and real-time data streaming are particularly relevant as more products are connected and collecting data to operate in complex environments.

High-Performance Computing

Altair’s high-performance computing software applications are designed to maximize the efficient utilization of customers’ complex compute resources and streamline the workflow management of compute-intensive tasks. The quantity of data collected, stored and processed is growing exponentially, and our HPC technology has evolved to support big data and input/output (IO) intensive environments with storage-aware scheduling. We support applications such as modeling, simulation, artificial intelligence, and visualization in fields such as banking, financial services, insurance, weather prediction, bio-informatics, electronic design analysis, product development and lifecycle management.    

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Altair’s high-performance tools manage and optimize where and when jobs are running and how storage is accessed and managed for customers and research institutes. We believe that HPC is increasingly mission critical for organizations around the world. Predictive modeling and analysis is computationally intensive and computing environments increasingly rely on a mix of on-premise and cloud resources.  

Our powerful and easy to use solutions help IT administrators and business decision makers maximize throughput and minimize costs by leveraging sophisticated scheduling algorithms. Altair’s HPC solutions are designed to enable seamless shifting of workloads from on-premise data centers to the cloud, and between different cloud providers, depending on cost or resource availability including managing spot computing purchases. We also deliver powerful orchestration capabilities to manage extremely large-scale workflows with complex dependency management for applications in electronic design automation, artificial intelligence and others.

Data Analytics, AI, IoT, and Smart Product Development

Altair’s data analytics, AI, and IoT offerings include low-code solutions for data preparation, data science, MLOps, and visualization that fuel engineering, scientific, and business decisions. Altair’s AI tools are extensively used by banks, credit unions, health care, and other financial services organizations. They are also used in finance departments across many industries, including manufacturing. We have been actively integrating ML and AI technologies in our broad product portfolio to capitalize on the significant momentum toward applying AI across a substantial number of companies and in many different industries.

Our data preparation tools allow users to import, clean and organize structured and unstructured data for use in reporting and in data science applications. Altair’s data science solutions allow users to develop machine learning workflows with market-leading decision tree technology and scoring algorithms, and innovative approaches to AutoML and Explainable AI. Our visualization tools allow users to gain deep insights quickly with both live-streamed and historical data.

Altair’s tools also include solutions to support smart connected product development including device enablement, data capture and management, edge orchestration, digital twins, and application development for connected devices. Our software is used to design IoT solutions and monitor and optimize their performance.

Going forward, we believe that development lifecycles will include digital replicas of complex processes, services and physical assets and systems, or what is known as “digital twins” which leverage the convergence of simulation and AI and are essential to creating better products, marketing them efficiently, and optimizing their performance. In our view, AI technology is transforming engineering design and process development, leveraging both synthetic data from simulations and rapidly growing databases of sensor data from field operations. Altair’s customers are using AI not only to create better products but also to lower scrap rates, reduce warranty issues, and derive other business benefits.

Altair Partner Alliance

The Altair Partner Alliance, or APA, provides access to a broad spectrum of complementary software products using customers’ existing Altair Units. Our units-based subscription licensing model allows flexible and shared access to our applications and those of our partners, which can all be downloaded on-demand. This constantly growing portfolio extends their simulation and design capabilities to help create better products faster.

Software products in the APA include technologies ranging from computational fluid dynamics and fatigue to manufacturing process simulation and cost estimation, with applications specific to industry verticals including marine, motorcycles, aerospace, chemicals, and architecture. Altair plans to continue to add valuable third-party software solutions to empower innovation with comprehensive enterprise analytic and data analytics tools.

Software Services

To enable customer success and deepen our relationships with them, we engage with our customers to provide services related to our software including consulting, training, and implementation services, especially when applying optimization and data science. Altair’s headquarters includes an industrial design studio, a prototype shop, and test facilities. We have expertise designing and working with controls, power electronics, traditional and composite structures, and total system level development in the automotive, aerospace, consumer products and other markets. Our team of data scientists is experienced with applications ranging from credit scoring to predictive analytics of physical assets.

Implementation and custom software services are available to help customers leverage their investment in Altair’s software to streamline workflows and solve specialized industry vertical engineering and business problems. We work closely with our clients to increase organizational efficiency and decision making by tailoring these solutions to a client’s own environment and processes.

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We believe the unique combination of our broad industry domain knowledge and software expertise has enabled Altair to enhance and replace customers’ legacy applications, integrate our software applications with client business systems, develop clean-sheet designs or custom software solutions, and transform their product development and business processes.

Software Related Services

Altair engages with our customers to provide technical services throughout their entire product development lifecycle including design, engineering, and development, especially when applying optimization and data analysis. Our headquarters includes an industrial design studio, a prototype shop, and test facilities. We have expertise designing and working with controls, power electronics, traditional and composite structures, and total system level development in the automotive, aerospace, consumer products and other markets. Our team of data analysts is experienced with applications ranging from credit scoring to predictive analytics of physical assets.

Client Engineering Services

Altair provides Client Engineering Services, or CES, to support our customers with long-term ongoing expertise. This has the benefit of embedding us within customers, deepening our understanding of their processes, and allowing us to more quickly perceive trends in the overall market. Our presence at our customers’ sites helps us to better tailor our software products’ research and development, or R&D, and sales initiatives.

We operate our CES business by hiring engineers and data scientists for placement at a customer site for specific customer-directed assignments. We employ and pay them only for the duration of the placement.

We concentrate on placing simulation specialists, industrial designers, design engineers, materials experts, development engineers, manufacturing engineers and information technology specialists. As a leader in the simulation and data science technology markets, Altair attracts high caliber talent from around the world. CES is focused on placements that align strategically with customer usage of our software. We have a strong recruiting operation with sourcing specialists who identify, attract, vet, and hire technical professionals for our in-house and customer needs. We maintain a candidate database of over 200,000 highly qualified engineers, designers and data scientists. Our CES candidates and placed employees are valuable sources of talent acquisition for Altair’s other business segments.

In response to COVID-19, some of our CES customers furloughed staff positions, while some other customers reduced CES staff working hours, reduced billing rates or eliminated certain positions. We have acted in concert with those customers to furlough or curtail the hours and compensation of those impacted employees until such time as our customers return to normal staffing, billing rates or required working hours.

Research and Development

Our research and development efforts are focused on enhancing the functionality, breadth, and scalability of our software, addressing new use cases, and developing additional innovative simulation technologies. Timely development of new products is essential to maintaining our competitive position, and we release new versions of our software on a regular basis.

Customer feedback, combined with our roadmap, enables us to deliver long-term value and stay ahead of market trends. The majority of product enhancements and new capabilities added to our offerings over the years have been developed internally, with acquisitions used to augment our capabilities with strategic technology.

From time-to-time, we incubate related technologies developed by our employees. For example, we developed and patented next-generation solid-state lighting technology as a result of an internal initiative. We commercialized this technology under our toggled subsidiary.

Our research and development initiatives foster a culture of innovation within the organization, helping us attract and retain a highly motivated team. Altair’s research and development team consists of approximately 1,200 people worldwide. We maintain research and development centers with specific technical expertise in several geographies throughout the Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Our research and development efforts relating to our software focus on three areas:

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The graphical applications used to construct and visualize simulation models require continuous R&D in the areas of data structures, computational methods, graphics, geometric modeling, mesh generation, and user interface design. Altair’s modeling tools are becoming more design-centric and are adopting some of the capabilities of traditional CAD while leveraging simulation and optimization technology to drive design decisions rather than just simulate designs. Specific areas of R&D include handling large scale models of highly detailed and complex products, developing new methods to derive design geometry from optimizations, and unifying the modeling environment for multi-physics simulation. Adapting modeling and visualization technology for cloud deployment is also an area of active development as is supporting virtual and augmented reality hardware. Simulation-driven design requires tools to generate early concepts addressing requirements for ergonomics, aesthetics, performance, and manufacturing feasibility. We believe these tools are emerging as an alternative to traditional CAD tools and will enable the democratization of simulation capabilities for designers and engineers who are not simulation specialists.  

Our industrial and concept design tools generate early concepts to address requirements for ergonomics, aesthetics, performance, manufacturing feasibility, and cost. These tools are all driven by simulation and machine learning algorithms.

Altair develops best-in-class HPC workload management technology for large scale, highly parallel job environments as well as solutions for chip design workloads which require massive numbers of jobs to be spawned and managed for relatively short durations. We also develop powerful orchestration capabilities to manage extremely large-scale workflows with complex dependency management for applications in electronic design automation, artificial intelligence and other areas.

We develop solutions for both CPU and GPU architectures and support all of the major computer vendors. This requires ongoing collaboration with hardware suppliers who depend on our solutions to make their products run efficiently for customers.

Much of our more recent R&D investments allow customers to easily move and manage workflows in hybrid compute environments of on-premise and cloud resources.

The quantity of data collected, stored and processed is growing exponentially, and our HPC technology has evolved to support big data and IO intensive environments with storage-aware scheduling. We also develop and deliver powerful orchestration capabilities to manage extremely large-scale workflows with complex dependency management for applications in electronic design automation, artificial intelligence and others.

Altair’s HPC development teams work closely with the simulation, data analytics, AI, and IoT development teams to ensure that our overall technology portfolio interoperates effectively and shares a common infrastructure and user experience.

Altair’s solutions support smart connected product development including device enablement, data capture and management, edge orchestration, digital twins, and application development for connected devices. Our software is used to design and optimize IoT devices and connectivity, and for modeling in-service product performance. We are investing to deliver an end-to-end solution for customers developing connected products. We believe our products operate well as a complete and integrated suite, and are open such that they are designed to work seamlessly with other IoT or data analytics solutions in a

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disaggregated fashion. Altair’s toggled LED lighting subsidiary is an important learning and deployment environment as we gain real-world experience with these technologies and share that knowledge with our customers.

Our digital twin platform supports product development for the IoT through a math-based programming environment, multi-disciplinary system modeling, and control system development, and is an important ongoing research and development effort. We believe that AI technology is transforming engineering design and process development, leveraging both synthetic data from simulations and rapidly growing databases of sensor data from field operations.  

We support our own high-level matrix-based numerical computing language, as well as more commonly used general purpose programming languages, like Python and Tcl, in an interactive programming environment for all types of math operations. We expect to add more language and library support, broaden the math libraries, and integrate these products more deeply with Altair’s other software.  

In order to maintain and extend our technology leadership and competitive position, we intend to continue devoting significant effort to our research and development activities.

Sales

We serve customers in the product lifecycle management, simulation, data analytics, AI, and high-performance computing markets. Our primary users are highly educated and technical engineers and data scientists.

We engage with our enterprise customers through Altair’s experienced direct sales force. We are increasing our use of inside sales and indirect channels to more efficiently address a broader set of customers in consumer products, electronics, energy and other industries.

Approximately 90% of our 2020 software revenue was generated through our direct global sales force. These sales teams interact with key decision makers, engage deeply with users of our products by leveraging a team of Altair’s technical specialists, and work with user-group managers and executives to ensure they are maximizing the utility of our software solutions. We have been expanding our direct sales team including our inside sales operations aggressively to reach more customers and market verticals.

Our direct sales force is responsible for developing new customers, ensuring high recurring rates from our existing customers, and expanding the use of Altair and partner products within customers’ environments through continuous training, support, and consulting engagements. Each of our field sales professionals are supported by technical specialists with deep knowledge of our products and the broader product development domain. We believe this approach differentiates Altair from our competitors, as our focus on establishing a strong working relationship with the user community has led to expanded usage of Altair and APA partner products. Our direct sales force is organized by geographic regions, consisting of Americas, EMEA, and APAC.

We leverage indirect sales channels especially in APAC and Eastern Europe and have been investing to extend our reseller relationships in all markets. Approximately 10% of our 2020 software revenue was generated through our growing network of indirect channel partners and resellers.

Data Analytics, AI, IoT, and Smart Product Development

The data analytics and AI market is segmented by industry verticals where specific domain expertise is important for success.  Altair’s primary data analytics and AI customer base is banks, insurance companies, health care, and other financial services organizations along with finance departments across most industries including manufacturing. As we cross sell into Altair traditional manufacturing customer accounts, we are targeting both the finance departments, leveraging the expertise of our financial markets sales and technical teams, as well as engineering departments looking to apply data analytics and AI to improve designs, manufacturing, warranty, and in-service operations. We intend to leverage our existing direct and indirect sales channels in order to support greater market opportunities.

High-Performance Computing Solutions

Altair’s HPC solutions are sold by our global strategic sales force with sales overlay support from Altair HPC sales specialists and application engineers. We have original equipment manufacturer, or OEM, arrangements for these solutions with most of the major hardware companies. We believe these arrangements reduce competition, grow our market share and improve sales efficiency.

We offer Altair PBS Professional as both an open source and a commercial solution. Commercial sites generally license the commercial version along with support. However, many universities, government agencies and small commercial sites prefer the open source version as their work often needs to be freely available for societal benefit. Large government and research installations generally still purchase support and often pay for specific development.

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Licensing

There are two licensing methods we employ to deliver our software solutions:  

Altair pioneered a patented units-based subscription licensing model for software and other digital content. This units-based subscription licensing model allows flexible and shared access to our offerings, along with over 150 partner products. Our customers license a pool of units for their organizations giving individual users access to our entire portfolio of software applications as well as our growing portfolio of partner products. We believe our units-based subscription licensing model lowers barriers to adoption, creates broad engagement, encourages users to work within our ecosystem, and increases revenue. This, in turn, helps drive our recurring software license rate which has been on average approximately 89% over the past five years. Each year approximately 60% of new software revenue comes from expansion within existing customers.

Marketing

Altair’s global marketing team of approximately 95 people is focused on generating new business opportunities by driving awareness, deepening customer engagement, and developing content specific to technical fields and industry verticals. Our corporate marketing programs include social media, earned media, publications, blogs, white papers and case studies. Our regional marketing program supports working relationships with our user community through education, participation in local industry events, Altair technical conferences, and webinars.

We provide marketing support to our ecosystem of resellers and third-party technology partners on both a corporate and regional level.

In order to continue to drive growth and extend our market position, we intend to continue to invest significant resources into our marketing initiatives.

Customers

As of December 31, 2020, we had more than 11,000 customers worldwide. Our simulation and HPC customers are primarily large manufacturing enterprises, with a growing presence in small and mid-size companies. Our AI customers include banks, credit unions, health care organizations, and other financial services organizations along with finance departments across most industries including manufacturing.

Automotive and aerospace combined account for approximately 45% of our 2020 billings, including 15 out of 15 of the world’s leading automotive manufacturers and 10 out of 10 of the world’s leading aerospace manufacturers. Other important industries include heavy machinery, rail and ship design, energy, government, life and earth sciences, BFSI, and consumer electronics. No single customer, nor any of our resellers and OEMS, accounted for more than 2% of our 2020 software billings. In 2020, we generated 38%, 31% and 31% of our total billings from customers in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC, respectively. Billings consists of our total revenue plus the change in our deferred revenue, excluding deferred revenue from acquisitions during the period, and is discussed under Non-GAAP Financial Measures included in Part II, Item 7, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

For a summary of our financial information by geographic location, see Note 18 of Notes to consolidated financial statements in Item 15, Part IV of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, which is incorporated by reference.

Competition

The market for simulation, HPC, data analytics, and AI software is highly fragmented. Our primary competitors include companies such as IBM, Dassault Systèmes, Siemens, Ansys, MSC Software (a Hexagon company), and Alteryx. Many are large public companies, with significant financial resources. In addition to these competitors, we compete with many smaller companies offering similar software applications.

We believe the breadth and depth of Altair’s software offering is unique and no single competitor addresses our entire solution set. The units model further extends this advantage with a growing APA marketplace of third party software.

Our simulation solutions including modeling, visualization and solvers are noted in the market for their ability to handle large and complex models. Our software applications deliver high performance and high scalability, including massive parallelization, which is

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extremely important in the high-end simulation market. Altair is a leader in integrating optimization technology across all our products, including multi-disciplinary applications.

We believe our solutions for data preparation, data science and AI are extremely strong, easy to use, powerful, and broadly adopted and have several unique capabilities including handling large, complex data sets coupled with our ability to intelligently import unstructured data.

To ensure customer success and deepen our relationships with them, we engage with our customers to provide consulting, implementation services, training, and support, especially when applying optimization. We believe these services, combined with our ability to leverage HPC as the industry transitions to cloud computing, positions us for future success.

We compete on a variety of factors including the breadth, depth, performance, and quality of our technical solutions. We believe our patented units-based subscription licensing model provides us with a competitive advantage by lowering barriers to adoption, creating broad engagement, and encouraging users to work within our ecosystem.

Intellectual property

We believe that our intellectual property rights are valuable and important to our business. We actively protect our investment in technology through establishment and enforcement of intellectual property rights. We protect our intellectual property through a combination of patent, copyright, trademark and trade secret protections, confidentiality procedures, and contractual provisions. The nature and extent of legal protection associated with each such intellectual property right depends on, among other things, the type of intellectual property right and the given jurisdiction in which such right arises.

As of December 31, 2020, we have 271 issued patents and more than 90 published patent applications worldwide. These patents and patent applications seek to protect proprietary inventions relevant to our business. We intend to pursue additional patent protection to the extent we believe it would be beneficial and cost effective. Additionally, we are the registered holder of a variety of trademarks and domain names that include “Altair” and similar variations.

Nonetheless, our intellectual property rights may not be successfully asserted in the future or may be invalidated, circumvented, or challenged. In addition, the laws and enforcement of the laws of various countries where our products are distributed do not protect our intellectual property rights to the same extent as United States laws. Our inability to assert or enforce our intellectual property rights could harm our business.

From time to time, we receive claims alleging infringement of a third party’s intellectual property rights, including patents. Disputes involving our intellectual property rights or those of another party have in the past and may in the future lead to, among other things, costly litigation, diversion of time, money and resources to develop or obtain non-infringing products, or delay product distribution. Any significant impairment of our core intellectual property rights could harm our business or our ability to compete.

Our products are licensed to users pursuant to signed license agreements or ‘click through’ agreements containing restrictions on use, duplication, disclosure, and transfer. Cloud based products and associated services are provided to users pursuant to online or signed terms of service agreements containing appropriate restrictions on access and use.

We are unable to measure the full extent to which piracy of our software products exists. We believe, however, that software piracy is and can be expected to be a persistent problem that negatively impacts our revenue and financial results. We believe that our predominant subscription based business model combined with the change from desktop to cloud based computing will shift the incentives and means by which software is pirated.

In addition, through various licensing arrangements, we receive certain rights to intellectual property of others. We expect to maintain current licensing arrangements and to secure additional licensing arrangements in the future, as needed and to the extent available on reasonable terms and conditions, to support continued development and sales of our products and services. Some of these licensing arrangements require or may require royalty payments and other licensing fees. The amount of these payments and fees may depend on various factors, including but not limited to: the structure of royalty payments, offsetting considerations, if any, and the degree of use of the licensed technology.

Employees

As of December 31, 2020, we had more than 2,700 in-house employees and more than 350 on-site Client Engineering Services employees globally. More than two-thirds of our employees are located in the United States, India, France and Germany. None of our employees in the United States are represented by a labor organization or are party to any collective bargaining arrangement. In some of the European countries in which we operate, we are subject to, and comply with, local labor law requirements in relation to the establishment of works councils. We are often required to consult and seek the consent or advice of these councils. We have never

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experienced a work stoppage and we believe our employee relations are good. We continually recruit for top talent and invest in our global workforce to fuel diversity, professional and personal growth, and innovation.

Diversity

We believe that empowering each individual authentic voice encourages an entrepreneurial mindset. We have worked to create a culture of inclusion where diversity and experiences are embraced and essential to our success and long-term growth. We recognize and believe that everyone deserves respect and equal treatment. We believe that we comply in all material respects with all applicable U.S. Federal, state, local and international laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the Company operates. Our goal is to assure that all applicants and employees are treated with the same high level of respect regardless of their gender, ethnicity, religion, national origin, age, marital status, political affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or protected veteran status.

Human capital metrics

We monitor human capital metrics such as recruitment, attrition, development, and diversity. Our strong brand, innovative product portfolio, cross-industry expertise, and culture support our ability to recruit and retain top talent.

COVID-19

Altair’s culture has historically embraced flexible work arrangements. As the COVID-19 pandemic spread, our workforce transitioned to nearly full remote working. Our culture, technology and people allowed us to react quickly when the crisis initially emerged. As a result, we maintained high levels of productivity and employee engagement. We adopted global and local COVID-19 safety protocols and guidelines to ensure the safety, health and wellness of our employees, families, and local communities. We also provide virtual health and wellness programs, such as Pilates, meditation, mental health tips, and information sessions by medical professionals to educate and answer questions about COVID-19. Our executive staff, including the CEO, was highly engaged with our workforce through podcasts, town halls, and other methods of outreach enabled by the accelerated adoption of virtual communication platforms.

Sustainability and environment

As the world is demanding safer, more efficient and innovative products and processes, our vision is to help customers drive decisions leveraging the convergence of simulation, HPC, and AI. By helping our customers, we help to reduce the environmental impact of goods and services across a broad array of industries worldwide.

We believe that our software technology and consulting services are by their very essence at the core of designing a healthier and more sustainable future for humanity. These efforts include:

We also are committed to conducting our business in a manner that manages environmental issues responsibly. We fulfill this commitment by our efforts to:

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Acquisitions

We have acquired 37 companies or strategic technologies since 1996, including 26 in the last five years. These acquisitions brought strategic IP assets, and talented developers with expertise in disciplines ranging from electronics, material science, crash and safety to industrial design and rendering. Products which are commercially available as a result of these acquisitions include Click2Extrude, Altair PBS Professional, Radioss, Evolve, Acusolve, SimLab, Embed, Click2Cast, Multi-scale Designer, FEKO, FLUX, WinProp, Thea Render, Modeliis, SmartWorks, ESAComp, SimSolid, Monarch, Knowledge Studio, Panopticon, EDEM, PollEx, PolyFoam, Mistral, and Breeze.

Our 2020 acquisitions include the following:

For further information about our acquisitions, see Note 4 of the Notes to consolidated financial statements in Item 15, Part IV of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Seasonal variations

We have experienced and expect to continue to experience seasonal variations in the timing of customers’ purchases of our software and services. Many customers make purchase decisions based on their fiscal year budgets, which often coincide with the calendar year. These seasonal trends materially affect the timing of our cash flows, as license fees become due at the time the license term commences based upon agreed payment terms that customers may not adhere to. As a result, new and renewal licenses have been concentrated in the first and fourth quarter of the year, and our cash flows from operations have been highest late in the first quarter and early in the second quarter of the succeeding fiscal year.

Backlog

We generally enter into single year term-based software licensing subscription contracts for our solutions. The timing of our invoices to the customer is a negotiated term and thus varies among our subscription contracts. For multi-year agreements, it is common to invoice an initial amount at contract signing followed by subsequent annual invoices. At any point in the contract term, there can be amounts that we have not yet been contractually able to invoice. As we generally enter into single year subscription contracts for our platform, backlog is not significant.

Governmental Regulation

Our business is subject to regulation by various federal, state, local and foreign governmental agencies, including agencies responsible for monitoring and enforcing employment and labor laws, workplace safety and environmental laws, privacy and data protection laws, financial services laws, anti-bribery laws, import and export controls, federal securities laws and tax laws and regulations. In certain foreign jurisdictions, these regulatory requirements may be more stringent than those in the United States. These laws and regulations are subject to change over time and thus we must continue to monitor and dedicate resources to ensure continued compliance. We strive to maintain compliance with all applicable laws and regulations and to anticipate future regulatory developments. For additional information, see “Risk Factors - Risks related to legal or regulatory matters.”

Segments

We have identified two reportable segments: Software and Client Engineering Services. For additional information about our reportable segments, see Note 18 of the Notes to consolidated financial statements in Item 15, Part IV of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, which is incorporated by reference.

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Corporate information

We were incorporated in Michigan in 1985 and became a Delaware company in October 2017. Our principal executive offices are located at 1820 E. Big Beaver Road, Troy, Michigan 48083.

Unless the context otherwise requires, the terms “Altair,” “the Company,” “we,” “us” and “our” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K refer to Altair Engineering Inc. and its subsidiaries. The Altair design logo and the marks “OptiStruct,” “RADIOSS,” “AcuSolve,” “FEKO,” “Flux,” “WinProp,” “Multiscale Designer,” “HyperStudy,” “HyperMesh,” “HyperView,” “SimLab,” “HyperCrash,” “HyperGraph,” “Inspire,” “solidThinking Evolve,” “Thea Render,” “Click2Cast,” “Click2Extrude,” “Click2Form,” “Carriots,” “Altair PBS Works,” “Altair PBS Professional,” “Altair PBS Cloud,” “MotionView,” “MotionSolve,” “Altair PBS Access,” “SimSolid,” “Knowledge Studio,” “Monarch,” “Panopticon,” “EDEM,” “PollEx” and our other registered or common law trade names, trademarks or service marks appearing in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are our property.

Available information

We file annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K, proxy and information statements and amendments to reports filed or furnished pursuant to Sections 13(a), 14 and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. The SEC also maintains a website at http://www.sec.gov that contains reports, proxy and information statements and other information regarding Altair Engineering Inc. and other companies that file materials with the SEC electronically. Copies of Altair’s reports on Form 10-K, Forms 10-Q and Forms 8-K, may be obtained, free of charge, electronically through our internet website, http://investor.altair.com under the Financials tab.

Our website is www.altair.com. Investors and others should note that we announce material financial information to investors using press releases, SEC filings and public conference calls. The information contained on our website is not incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K or in any other report or document we file with the SEC.

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Item 1A. Risk Factors

An investment in our Class A common stock involves a high degree of risk. You should carefully consider the risks and uncertainties described below, together with all the other information in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and the consolidated financial statements and the related notes. If any of the following risks actually occurs, our business, reputation, financial condition, results of operations, revenue, and future prospects could be seriously harmed. Unless otherwise indicated, references to our business being seriously harmed in these risk factors will include harm to our business, reputation, financial condition, results of operations, revenue, liquidity and future prospects.

SUMMARY

The following summarizes key risks and uncertainties that could materially adversely affect us. You should read this summary together with the more detailed description of each risk factor contained below.

Risks relating to our business and industry, including risks relating to:

Risks relating to our intellectual property, including risks relating to:

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Risks relating to legal or regulatory matters, including risks relating to:

Risks relating to ownership of our Class A Common Stock, including risks relating to:

Risks relating to our indebtedness, including risks relating to:

General risks, including risks relating to:

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Risks relating to our business and industry

We have experienced significant revenue growth and we may fail to sustain that growth rate or may not grow in the future.

We were founded in 1985 and launched our first commercial software in 1990. Our growth has primarily been attributed to the increasing sales of our simulation, high-performance computing and data analytics technologies to enhance decision making, product performance, compress development time, and reduce costs. Revenue from our software segment has historically constituted a significant portion of our total revenue. Our revenue growth could decline over time as a result of a number of factors, including increasing competition from smaller entities and well-established, larger organizations, limited ability to, or our decision not to, increase pricing, contraction of our overall market, the manner in which the markets for our products, including our data analytics products, evolve or our failure to capitalize on growth opportunities. Other factors include managing our global organization, revenues generated outside the United States that are subject to adverse currency fluctuations, uncertain international geopolitical landscapes and the acquisition of businesses which may grow more slowly than our business. Accordingly, we may not achieve similar growth rates in future periods, and you should not rely on our historical revenue growth as an indication of our future revenue or revenue growth.

If we cannot maintain our company culture of innovation, teamwork, and communication, our business may be harmed.

We believe that a critical component to our success has been our company culture, which is based on our core values of innovation, envisioning the future, communicating honestly and broadly, seeking technology and business firsts, and embracing diversity. We have invested substantial time and resources in building a company embodying this culture. As we continue to develop the infrastructure of a public company and continue to grow, we may find it difficult to maintain these valuable aspects of our corporate culture. Any failure to preserve our culture, or embed our culture in our acquired businesses, could negatively impact our future success, including our ability to attract and retain personnel, encourage innovation and teamwork, and effectively focus on and pursue our corporate objectives.

If our existing customers or users do not increase their usage of our software, or we do not add new customers, the growth of our business may be harmed.

Our software includes a comprehensive open architecture solution for simulation, high-performance computing, data analytics, and artificial intelligence.

Our future success depends, in part, on our ability to increase the:

Our future success may also depend upon the degree to which the evolution of our units licensing model is accepted by our current and potential customers.  

In addition, through our Altair Partner Alliance, or APA, our customers have access to additional software offered by independent third parties, without the need to enter into additional license agreements.

If we fail to increase the number of customers or users and/or application usage among existing users of our software and the software of our APA partners, our ability to license additional software will be adversely affected, which would harm our operating results and financial condition.

Our ability to acquire new customers is difficult to predict because our software sales cycle can be long.

Our ability to increase revenue and maintain or increase profitability depends, in part, on widespread acceptance of our software by mid- to- large-size organizations worldwide. We face long, costly, and unpredictable sales cycles. As a result of the variability and length of the sales cycle, we have only a limited ability to forecast the timing of sales. A delay in or failure to complete sales could harm our business and financial results, and could cause our financial results to vary significantly from period to period. Our sales cycle varies widely, reflecting differences in potential customers’ decision-making processes, procurement requirements, budget cycles and the specific software or products being purchased, and is subject to significant risks over which we have little or no control, including:

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To the extent any of the foregoing occur, our average sales cycle may increase and we may have difficulty acquiring new customers.

Reduced spending on product design and development activities by our customers may negatively affect our revenues.

Our revenues are largely dependent on our customers’ overall product design and development activities, particularly demand from mid- to- large-size organizations worldwide and their supplier base. The licensing of our software is discretionary. Our customers may reduce their research and development budgets, which could cause them to reduce, defer, or forego licensing of our software. To the extent licensing of our software is perceived by existing and potential customers to be extraneous to their needs, our revenue may be negatively affected by our customers’ delays or reductions in product development research and development spending. Customers may delay or cancel software licensing or seek to lower their costs. Deterioration in the demand for product design and development software for any reason would harm our business, operating results, and financial condition in the future.

Our business largely depends on annual renewals of our software licenses.

We typically license our software to our customers on an annual basis. In order for us to maintain or improve our operating results, it is important that our customers renew and/or increase the amount of software licensed on an annual basis. Customer renewal rates may be affected by a number of factors, including:

If our customers fail to renew their licenses or renew on terms that are less beneficial to us, our renewal rates may decline or fluctuate, which may harm our business.

We believe our future success will depend, in part, on the growth in demand for our software by customers other than simulation engineering specialists and in additional industry verticals.

Historically, our customers have been simulation engineering specialists. To enable concept engineering, driven by simulation, we make our physics solvers more accessible to designers by wrapping them in powerful simple interfaces. We believe our future success will depend, in part, on growth in demand for our software by these designers, which could be negatively impacted by the lack of:

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If some or all of this software does not achieve widespread adoption, our revenues and profits may be adversely affected.

Our ability to grow our business may be adversely impacted by difficulties we may experience in integrating recent acquisitions or in integrating future acquisitions.

We believe that our recent acquisitions result in certain benefits, including expanding our portfolio of software and products and enabling us to better serve our customers’ needs. However, to realize some of these anticipated benefits, the acquired businesses must be successfully integrated. The success of these acquisitions will depend in part on our ability to realize these anticipated benefits. We may fail to realize the anticipated benefits of these acquisitions for a variety of reasons, including the following:

We face significant competition, which may adversely affect our ability to add new customers, retain existing customers, and grow our business.

The market for simulation, data analytics, and high-performance computing software is highly fragmented. Our primary competitors include companies such as IBM, Dassault Systèmes, Siemens, Ansys, MSC Software (a Hexagon company), and Alteryx. Many are large public companies, with significant financial resources. In addition to these competitors, we compete with many smaller companies offering similar software applications.

A significant number of companies have developed or are developing software and services that currently, or in the future, may compete with some or all of our software and services. We may also face competition from participants in adjacent markets, including two-dimensional, or 2D, and three-dimensional, or 3D, CAD, and broader PLM competitors and others that may enter our markets by leveraging related technologies and partnering with or acquiring other companies.

The principal competitive factors in our industry include:

Many of our current and potential competitors have longer-term and more extensive relationships with our existing and potential customers that provide them with an advantage in competing for business with those customers. They may be able to devote greater resources to the development and improvement of their offerings than we can. These competitors could incorporate additional functionality into their competing products from their wider product offerings or leverage their commercial relationships in a manner that uses product bundling or closed technology platforms to discourage enterprises from purchasing our applications.

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Many existing and potential competitors enjoy competitive advantages over us, such as:

These competitive pressures in our markets or our failure to compete effectively may result in fewer customers, price reductions, licensing of fewer units, increased sales and marketing expenses, reduced revenue and gross profits and loss of market share. Any failure to address these factors could harm our business.

Because we derive a substantial portion of our revenues from customers in the automotive industry, we are susceptible to factors affecting this industry.

Billings in the automotive industry accounted for approximately 36% of our 2020 billings. An adverse occurrence, including industry slowdown, due to the impacts of COVID-19 or otherwise, recession, political instability, costly or constraining regulations, rapid technological obsolescence, excessive inflation, prolonged disruptions in one or more of our automotive customers’ production schedules, supply disruptions, or labor disturbances, that results in a significant decline in the volume of sales in this industry, or in an overall downturn in the business and operations of our customers in this industry, could adversely affect our business.

The automotive industry is highly cyclical in nature and sensitive to changes in general economic conditions, consumer preferences and interest rates. Any weakness in demand in this industry, the insolvency of a manufacturer or suppliers, or constriction of credit markets may cause our automotive customers to reduce their amount of software licensed or services requested or request discounts or extended payment terms, any of which may cause fluctuations or a decrease in our revenues and timing of cash flows.

The COVID-19 pandemic, or other potential future pandemics or events, may cause severe business interruptions either globally or regionally, that could have a negative impact on our financial results.

In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of a novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected our customers, the global economy and financial markets. The full extent to which COVID-19 will impact global or regional economies will depend on future developments that are highly uncertain, especially in light of the emergence of new variants and potential for additional variants to emerge and cannot be accurately predicted. New information is likely to emerge concerning COVID-19, including information related to the development, effectiveness and roll-out of vaccines, new variants of the virus, and the actions to contain it or treat COVID-19 with uncertain economic impact on local, regional, national, and international markets. Our future results of operations, financial condition and cash flows could be materially adversely affected by COVID-19, particularly if the pandemic persists for a significant amount of time causing a substantial longer-term contraction in business for our customer base, prior to eventual recovery.  

Many governments have enacted a rapid massive global response leveraging monetary and fiscal policy to mitigate long term economic harm, while providing short term economic support. While the implementation of policy responses varies country by country, and regionally, and has included mitigation efforts related to social distancing requirements, quarantine requirements, travel restrictions, and shelter in place orders, among others, the totality of the global response is based upon expectations that the response will serve to minimize the chance for a deep prolonged negative economic impact from COVID-19. Certain jurisdictions have begun to “re-open” their economies, within a relatively short time period of having engaged in substantial closure of most economic activity. Other jurisdictions have begun to consider moves to gradually “re-open” or have actually “re-opened”. In certain instances, governments deemed it necessary to reverse re-opening planning. The long term outcome of mitigation efforts is presently uncertain. The global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines is at an early stage and it is not possible to predict with certainty the impact of vaccines considering the logistical hurdles and current and potential COVID-19 variants that have developed or may emerge in the future.

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Additional risks from COVID-19 include the inability of our employees and those businesses upon which we rely for operations to carry out their responsibilities at levels of performance necessary to maintain our performance undisturbed as a result of measures taken by governmental authorities to limit the spread of COVID-19. It is possible that some of our furloughed CES personnel do not return to work when their positions return. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rapidly evolve. COVID-19 may also affect our operating and financial results in a manner that is not presently known to us, or that we currently to do not consider presenting significant risks to our operations.

The impact of COVID-19 on some of our customers has primarily contributed to the decrease in revenue for software related and client engineering services. While we continue to robustly engage with our customers, primarily virtually, to mitigate the uncertain extent of the negative impact of COVID-19 on our customers, our ability to attract, serve, retain, or expand customers will continue to be uncertain. A negative impact on our customers may cause them to delay entering into new or expanded software licenses, request extended payment terms, delayed invoicing, higher discounts, lower renewal amounts or cancelations, and a reduction in demand for software related and client engineering services. Existing and potential customers may choose to reduce or delay technology spending in response to COVID-19, or attempt to renegotiate contracts and obtain concessions, which may materially and negatively impact our operating results, financial condition and prospects.

Since we have substantial international operations that arise from our normal business operations, our financial results in 2021 may be impacted by COVID-19 driven variations in foreign currency exchange rates, apart from the traditional elements that underlie foreign currency exchange rate changes.

Recent developments with respect to COVID-19 vaccines have the potential to affect the scope and duration of the pandemic. While a number of COVID-19 vaccines have received regulatory approval and are available in limited quantities in the United States and other parts of the world, a degree of uncertainty exists with respect to the distribution, utilization, and long-term efficacy of vaccinations among the general population.

Adverse global conditions, including economic uncertainty, may negatively impact our financial results.

Global conditions, including the effects of the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, or Brexit, dislocations in the financial markets or any negative financial impacts affecting United States corporations operating on a global basis as a result of tax reform or changes to existing trade agreements or tax conventions, could adversely impact our business in a number of ways, including longer sales cycles, lower prices for our software license fees, reduced licensing renewals, customer disruption or foreign currency fluctuations.

The long term effects of Brexit will depend on any agreements the United Kingdom makes to retain access to European Union markets. The measures could potentially disrupt some of the markets we serve and may cause those customers to closely monitor their costs and reduce their spending budget on our products and services. In addition, Brexit could lead to legal uncertainty and potentially divergent national laws and regulations as the United Kingdom determines which European Union laws to replace or replicate. Given the lack of comparable precedent, it is unclear what the longer term financial, trade and legal implications the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union will have on us.

The United Kingdom Financial Conduct Authority, or the FCA, has announced its intention to phase out LIBOR rates by the end of 2021. It is not possible to predict the effect of this change, or other reforms or the establishment of alternative reference rates in the United Kingdom or elsewhere. We currently expect that, as a result of any phase out of LIBOR, the interest rates under our loan agreement would be amended as necessary to provide for an interest rate that approximates the existing interest rate as calculated in accordance with LIBOR, but could result in an increase in the cost of our variable rate indebtedness.

During challenging economic times our customers may be unable or unwilling to make timely payments to us, which could cause us to incur increased bad debt expenses. Our customers may unilaterally extend the payment terms of our invoices, adversely affecting our short-term or long-term cash flows.

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Our quarterly results may fluctuate significantly and may not fully reflect the underlying performance of our business.

Our quarterly results of operations and our key metrics, including Billings, Adjusted EBITDA and Free Cash Flow, may vary significantly in the future and seasonally. Many customers make purchase decisions based on their fiscal year budgets, which often coincide with the calendar year. These seasonal trends materially affect our financial results, as license fees become due at the time the license term commences based upon agreed payment terms that customers may not adhere to. As a result, new and renewal licenses have been concentrated in the first and fourth quarter of the year, and our cash flows from operations have been highest late in the first quarter and early in the second quarter of the succeeding fiscal year. Period-to-period comparisons of our operating results may not be meaningful. The results of any one quarter should not be relied upon as an indication of future performance. Our quarterly financial results and key metrics may fluctuate as a result of a variety of factors including:

Billings have historically been highest in the first and fourth quarters of any calendar year and may vary in future quarters. This seasonality or the occurrence of any of the factors above may cause our results of operations to vary and our financial statements may not fully reflect the underlying performance of our business.

In addition, we may choose to grow our business for the long-term rather than to optimize for profitability or cash flows for a particular shorter-term period. If our quarterly results of operations fall below the expectations of investors or securities analysts, the price of our Class A common stock could decline and we could face lawsuits, including securities class action suits.

Fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates could result in declines in our reported revenue and operating results.

As a result of our international activities, we have revenue, expenses, cash, accounts receivable and payment obligations denominated in foreign currencies including Euros, British Pounds Sterling, Indian Rupees, Japanese Yen, and Chinese Yuan. Foreign currency risk arises primarily from the net difference between non-United States dollar receipts from customers and non-United States dollar operating expenses. The value of foreign currencies against the United States dollar can fluctuate significantly, and those fluctuations may occur quickly. We cannot predict the impact of future foreign currency fluctuations.

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Strengthening of the United States dollar could cause our software to become relatively more expensive to some of our customers leading to decreased sales and a reduction in billings and revenue not denominated in United States dollars. A reduction in revenue or an increase in operating expenses due to fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates could have an adverse effect on our financial condition and operating results. Such foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations may make it more difficult to detect underlying trends in our business and operating results.

We do not currently engage in currency hedging activities to limit the risk of exchange rate fluctuations. In the future, we may use derivative instruments, such as foreign currency forward and option contracts, to hedge certain exposures to fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates. The use of such hedging activities may not offset any or more than a portion of the adverse financial effects of unfavorable movements in foreign exchange rates over the limited time the hedges are in place, and the cost of those hedging techniques may have a significant negative impact on our operating results. The use of hedging instruments may introduce additional risks if we are unable to structure effective hedges with such instruments. If we are not able to successfully manage or hedge against the risks associated with currency fluctuations, our financial condition and operating results could be adversely affected.

If we fail to attract new or retain existing third party independent software vendors to participate in the APA, we may not be able to grow the APA program.

Our APA program allows our customers to use third party software that may be unrelated to our software, without the need to enter into additional license agreements. The APA program results in increased revenues through revenue sharing, and encourages users to stay within the Altair software ecosystem. If third party software providers are unwilling to join the APA on appropriate terms, including agreeing with our revenue share allocations, or if we are unable to retain our current APA participants, we may not be able to grow the APA program.

Licensing of our software is dependent, in part, on performance of our distributors and resellers.

We have historically licensed our software primarily through our direct sales force. We have enhanced our units licensing model such that it is able to be licensed through a network of distributors and resellers. If these distributors and resellers are unable to successfully adjust their sales methods to support our annual recurring licensing model, or become unstable, financially insolvent, or otherwise do not perform as we expect, our revenue growth derived from the distributor and reseller channels could be negatively impacted.

If we fail to adapt to technology changes our software may become less marketable, less competitive, or obsolete.

Our success depends in part on our ability to:

We may not be able to develop or market new or enhanced software in a timely manner, which could result in our software becoming less marketable, less competitive, or obsolete.

We believe our long-term value as a company will be greater if we focus on growth, which may negatively impact our profitability in the near term.

Part of our business strategy is to focus on our long-term growth. As a result, our profitability may be lower in the near term than it would be if our strategy were to maximize short-term profitability. Expanding our research and development efforts, sales and marketing efforts, infrastructure and other such investments may not ultimately grow our business or cause higher long-term profitability. If we are ultimately unable to achieve greater profitability at the level anticipated by analysts and our stockholders, our Class A common stock price may decline.

Our research and development may not generate revenue or yield expected benefits.

A key element of our strategy is to focus on innovation and invest significantly in research and development to create new software and enhance our existing software to address additional applications and serve new markets, both internally and through acquisitions. Research and development projects can be technically challenging and expensive, and there may be delays between the time we incur expenses and the time we are able to generate revenue, if any. Anticipated customer demand for any software we may develop could

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decrease after the development cycle has commenced, and we could be unable to avoid costs associated with the development of any such software. If we expend a significant amount of resources on research and development and our efforts do not lead to the timely introduction or improvement of software that is competitive in our current or future markets, it could harm our business.

If we lose our senior executives, we may be unable to achieve our business objectives.

We currently depend on the continued services and performance of James Scapa, our chief executive officer, and other senior executives. Many members of this executive team have served the Company for more than 15 years, with Mr. Scapa having served since our founding in 1985. Loss of Mr. Scapa’s services or those of other senior executives could delay or prevent the achievement of our business objectives.

Acquisitions may dilute our stockholders, disrupt our core business, divert our resources, or require significant management attention.

Most of our software has been developed internally with acquisitions used to augment our capabilities. We may not effectively identify, evaluate, integrate, or use acquired technology or personnel from prior or future acquisitions, or accurately forecast the financial impact of an acquisition, including accounting charges.

After the completion of an acquisition, it is possible that our valuation of such acquisition for purchase price allocation purposes may change compared to initial expectations and result in unanticipated write-offs or charges, impairment of our goodwill, or a material change to the fair value of the assets and liabilities associated with a particular acquisition.

We may pay cash, incur debt, or issue equity securities to fund an acquisition. The payment of cash will decrease available cash. The incurrence of debt would likely increase our fixed obligations and could subject us to restrictive covenants or obligations. The issuance of equity securities would likely be dilutive to our stockholders. We may also incur unanticipated liabilities as a result of acquiring companies. Future acquisition activity may disrupt our core business, divert our resources, or require significant management attention.

International operations expose us to risks inherent in international activities.

Operating in international markets requires significant resources and management attention and subjects us to regulatory, economic and political risks that are different from those in the United States. We face risks in doing business internationally that could adversely affect our business, including:

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Our inability to manage any of these risks successfully, or to comply with these laws and regulations, could reduce our sales and harm our business.

If we are unable to match engineers to open positions in our CES business or are otherwise unable to grow our CES business, our revenue could be adversely affected.

We operate our client engineering services business by hiring engineers and data scientists for placement at a customer site for specific customer-directed assignments and pay them only for the duration of the placement. The success of this business is dependent upon our ability to recruit and retain highly skilled, CES staff to meet the requirements of our customers and to maintain ongoing relationships with these customers. Our CES business constituted approximately 9% and 11% of our total revenues for the year ended December 31, 2020 and 2019, respectively. Some of our customers satisfy their engineering personnel needs through managed service providers, or MSPs. A significant percentage of the engineers we place, either directly or through MSPs, are with U.S.-based customers and are citizens of countries other than the United States. In the event these engineers are unable to enter into, or remain in, the United States legally, we may be unable to match engineers with the appropriate skill sets matched to open customer positions. If we are unable to attract highly skilled, qualified CES staff because of competitive factors or immigration laws, or otherwise fail to match CES staff to open customer positions, our revenue may be adversely affected.

Our sales to government agencies and their suppliers may be subject to reporting and compliance requirements.

Our customers include agencies of the various governments, including, but not limited to the United States, and their suppliers of products and services. These customers may procure our software and services through various governments’ mandated procurement regulations. Because of governmental reporting and compliance requirements, we may incur unexpected costs. Government agencies and their suppliers may have statutory, contractual or other legal rights to terminate contracts for convenience or due to a default, and any such termination may adversely affect our future operating results.

Our revenue mix may vary over time, which could harm our gross margin and operating results.

Our revenue mix may vary over time due to a number of factors, including the mix of term-based licenses and perpetual licenses. Due to the differing revenue recognition policies applicable to our term-based licenses, perpetual licenses and professional services, shifts in the mix between subscription and perpetual licenses from quarter to quarter, or increases or decreases in revenue derived from our professional engineering services, which have lower gross margins than our software services, could produce substantial variation in revenues recognized even if our billings remain consistent. Our gross margins and operating results could be impacted by changes in revenue mix and costs, together with other factors, including: entry into new markets or growth in lower margin markets; entry into markets with different pricing and cost structures; pricing discounts; and increased price competition. Any one of these factors or the cumulative effects of certain of these factors may result in significant fluctuations in our gross margin and operating results. This variability and unpredictability could result in our failure to meet internal expectations or those of securities analysts or investors for a particular period. If we fail to meet or exceed such expectations for these or any other reasons, the market price of our common stock could decline.

If our goodwill or intangible assets become impaired, we may be required to record a significant charge to earnings, which could harm our business.

Under GAAP, we review our intangible assets for impairment when events or changes in circumstances indicate the carrying value may not be recoverable. Goodwill is required to be tested for impairment at least annually. As of December 31, 2020 and 2019, respectively, we had $264.5 million and $233.7 million of goodwill and $76.1 million and $67.1 million of other intangible assets—net. An adverse change in market conditions, particularly if such change has the effect of changing one of our critical assumptions or estimates, could result in a change to the estimation of fair value that could result in an impairment charge.

In addition to our software, we source, distribute and sell products, which may expose us to product liability claims, product recalls, and warranty claims that could be expensive and harm our business.

We source, distribute and sell products, in part, through certain of our wholly owned subsidiaries. To the extent these products do not perform as expected, cause injury or death or are otherwise unsuitable for usage, we may be held liable for claims, including product liability and other claims. A product liability claim, any product recalls or an excessive warranty claim, whether arising from defects in design or failure in our supply chains could negatively affect our sales or require a change in the design process or our product sourcing, any of which may harm our reputation and business.

Risks related to our intellectual property

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Defects or errors in our software could result in loss of revenue or harm to our reputation.

Our software is complex and, despite extensive testing and quality control, may contain undetected or perceived bugs, defects, errors, or failures. From time to time we have found defects or errors in our software and we may discover additional defects in the future. We may not find defects or errors in new or enhanced software before release and these defects or errors may not be discovered by us or our customers until after they have used the software. We have in the past issued, and may in the future need to issue, corrective releases or updates of our software to remedy bugs, defects and errors or failures. The occurrence of any real or perceived bugs, defects, errors, or failures could result in:

Any of these problems could harm our business.

Failure to protect and enforce our proprietary technology and intellectual property rights could substantially harm our business.

The success of our business depends, in part, on our ability to protect and enforce our proprietary technology and intellectual property rights, including our trade secrets, patents, trademarks, copyrights, and other intellectual property. We attempt to protect our intellectual property under trade secret, patent, trademark, and copyright laws. Despite our efforts, we may not be able to protect our proprietary technology and intellectual property rights, if we are unable to enforce our rights or if we do not detect unauthorized use of our intellectual property. It may be possible for unauthorized third parties to copy our technology and use information that we regard as proprietary to create products and services that compete with ours. Provisions in our licenses protect against unauthorized use, copying, transfer and disclosure of our technology, but such provisions may be difficult to enforce or are unenforceable under the laws of certain jurisdictions and countries. The laws of some countries do not protect proprietary rights to the same extent as the laws of the United States. Our international activities expose us to unauthorized copying and use of our technology and proprietary information.

We primarily rely on our unpatented proprietary technology and trade secrets. Despite our efforts to protect our proprietary technology and trade secrets, unauthorized parties may attempt to misappropriate, reverse engineer or otherwise obtain and use them. The contractual provisions that we enter into with employees, consultants, partners, vendors and customers may not be sufficient to prevent unauthorized use or disclosure of our proprietary technology or trade secrets and may not provide an adequate remedy in the event of unauthorized use or disclosure of our proprietary technology or trade secrets.

Policing unauthorized use of our technologies, software and intellectual property is difficult, expensive and time-consuming, particularly in countries where the laws may not be as protective of intellectual property rights as those in the United States and where mechanisms for enforcement of intellectual property rights may be weak. We may be unable to detect or determine the extent of any unauthorized use or infringement of our software, technologies or intellectual property rights.

From time to time, we may need to engage in litigation or other administrative proceedings to protect our intellectual property rights or to defend against allegations by third parties that we have infringed or misappropriated their intellectual property rights, including in connection with requests for indemnification by our customers who may face such claims. We have been approached and may be approached in the future by certain of our customers to indemnify them against third party intellectual property claims. Litigation and/or any requests for indemnification by our customers could result in substantial costs and diversion of resources and could negatively affect our business and revenue. If we are unable to protect and enforce our intellectual property rights, our business may be harmed.

Intellectual property disputes could result in significant costs and harm our business.

Intellectual property disputes may occur in the markets in which we compete. Many of our competitors are large companies with significant intellectual property portfolios, which they may use to assert claims of infringement, misappropriation or other violations of intellectual property rights against us or our customers. Any allegation of infringement, misappropriation or other violation of

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intellectual property rights by a third party, even those without merit, could cause us to incur substantial costs defending against the claim, could distract our management from our business, and could cause uncertainty among our customers or prospective customers, all of which could have an adverse effect on our business or revenue.

Our agreements may include provisions that require us to indemnify others for losses suffered or incurred as a result of our infringement of a third party’s intellectual property rights infringement, including certain of our employees and customers.

An adverse outcome of a dispute or an indemnity claim may require us to:

Any of the foregoing or other damages could harm our business, decrease our revenue, increase our expenses or negatively impact our cash flow.

Security breaches, computer malware, computer hacking attacks and other security incidents could harm our business, reputation, brand and operating results.

Security incidents have become more prevalent across industries and may occur on our systems. Security incidents may be caused by, or result in but are not limited to, security breaches, computer malware or malicious software, computer hacking, unauthorized access to confidential information, denial of service attacks, security system control failures in our own systems or from vendors we use, email phishing, software vulnerabilities, social engineering, sabotage and drive-by downloads. Such security incidents, whether intentional or otherwise, may result from actions of hackers, criminals, nation states, vendors, employees or customers.

Our company is a highly automated business which relies on our network infrastructure and enterprise applications, cloud-based services, internal technology systems and website for development, marketing, operational, support and sales activities. A disruption or failure of these systems or in those of our external service providers, in the event of a major storm, earthquake, fire, telecommunications failure, cyber-attack, terrorist attack or other catastrophic event could cause system interruptions, reputational harm, delays in our product development and loss of critical data and could materially and adversely affect our ability to operate our business.

We may experience disruptions, data loss, outages and other performance problems on our systems due to service attacks, unauthorized access or other security related incidents. Any security breach or loss of system control caused by hacking, which involves efforts to gain unauthorized access to information or systems, or to cause intentional malfunctions or loss, modification or corruption of data, software, hardware or other computer equipment and the inadvertent transmission of computer malware could harm our business.

In addition, our software stores and transmits customers’ confidential business information in our facilities and on our equipment, networks, corporate systems and in the cloud. Security incidents could expose us to litigation, remediation costs, increased costs for security measures, loss of revenue, damage to our reputation and potential liability. Our customer data and corporate systems and security measures may be compromised due to the actions of outside parties, employee error, malfeasance, capacity constraints, a combination of these or otherwise and, as a result, an unauthorized party may obtain access to our data or our customers’ data. Outside parties may attempt to fraudulently induce our employees to disclose sensitive information in order to gain access to our customers’ data or our information. We must continuously examine and modify our security controls and business policies to address new threats, the use of new devices and technologies, and these efforts may be costly or distracting.

Because the techniques used to obtain unauthorized access, disable or degrade service, or sabotage systems change frequently or may be designed to remain dormant until a predetermined event and often are not recognized until launched against a target, we may be unable to anticipate these techniques or implement sufficient control measures to defend against these techniques. Though it is difficult to determine what harm may directly result from any specific incident or breach, any failure to maintain confidentiality, availability, integrity, performance and reliability of our systems and infrastructure may harm our reputation and our ability to retain existing customers and attract new customers. If an actual or perceived security incident occurs, the market perception of the effectiveness of our security controls could be harmed, our brand and reputation could be damaged, we could lose customers, and we could suffer financial exposure due to such events or in connection with remediation efforts, investigation costs, regulatory fines and changed security control, system architecture and system protection measures.

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We may lose customers if our software does not work seamlessly with our customers’ existing software.

Our customers may use our software, which in many instances has been designed to seamlessly interface with software from some of our competitors, together with their own software and software they license from third parties. If our software ceases to work seamlessly with our customers’ existing software applications, we may lose customers.

Many of our customers use our software and services to design and develop their products, which when built and used may expose us to claims.

Many of our customers use our software and services, together with software and services from other third parties and their own resources, to assist in the design and development of products intended to be used in a commercial setting. To the extent our customers design or develop a product that results in potential liability, including product liability, we may be included in resulting litigation. We may be subject to litigation defense costs or be subject to potential judgments or settlement costs for which we may not be fully covered by insurance, which would result in an increase of our expenses.

We also license certain of our software on Altair branded computer hardware, which we acquire from original equipment manufacturers, which we refer to as OEMs, exposing us to potential liability for the hardware, such as product liability. To the extent this liability is greater than the warranty and liability protection from our OEM, we may incur additional expenses, which may be significant.

If we fail to educate and train our users regarding the use and benefits of our software, we may not generate additional revenue.

Our software is complex and highly technical. We continually educate and train our existing and potential users regarding the depth, breadth, and benefits of our software including through classroom and online training. If these users do not receive education and training regarding the use and benefits of our software, or the education and training is ineffective, they may not increase their usage of our software. We may incur costs of training directly related to this activity prior to generating additional revenue.

We currently open source certain of our software and may open source other software in the future, which could have an adverse effect on our revenues and expenses and our use of open source technology could impose limitations on our ability to commercialize our software.

We offer our open matrix language, or OML, source code and a portion of our Altair PBS workload management software in an open source version to generate additional usage and broaden user-community development and enhancement of the software. We offer related software and services on a paid basis. We believe increased usage of open source software leads to increased purchases of these related paid offerings. We may offer additional software on an open source basis in the future. There is no assurance that the incremental revenues from related paid offerings will outweigh the lost revenues and incurred expenses attributable to the open sourced software.

We use open source software in some of our software and expect to continue to use open source software in the future. Although we monitor our use of open source software to avoid subjecting our software to conditions we do not intend, we may face allegations from others alleging ownership of, or seeking to enforce the terms of, an open source license, including by demanding release of the open source software, derivative works, or our proprietary source code that was developed using such software. These allegations could also result in litigation. The terms of many open source licenses have not been interpreted by United States courts. There is a risk that these licenses could be construed in a way that could impose unanticipated conditions or restrictions on our ability to commercialize our software. In such an event, we may be required to seek licenses from third parties to continue commercially offering our software, to make our proprietary code generally available in source code form, to re-engineer our software or to discontinue the sale of our software if re-engineering could not be accomplished on a timely basis, any of which could adversely affect our business and revenue.

The use of open source software subjects us to a number of other risks and challenges. Open source software is subject to further development or modification by anyone. Others may develop such software to be competitive with or no longer useful by us. It is also possible for competitors to develop their own solutions using open source software, potentially reducing the demand for our software. If we are unable to successfully address these challenges, our business and operating results may be adversely affected, and our development costs may increase.

Risks related to legal or regulatory matters

We operate internationally and must comply with employment and related laws in various countries, which may, in turn, result in unexpected expenses.

We are subject to a variety of domestic and foreign employment laws, including those related to safety, discrimination, whistle-blower, privacy and data protection, employment of unauthorized or undocumented employees, classification of employees,

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wages, statutory benefits, and severance payments. Such laws are subject to change as a result of judicial decisions or otherwise, and there can be no assurance that we will not be found to have violated any such laws in the future. Such violations could lead to the assessment of significant fines against us by federal, state or foreign regulatory authorities or to the award of damages claims, including severance payments, against us in judicial or administrative proceedings by employees or former employees, any of which would reduce our net income or increase our net loss.

Changes in government trade, immigration or currency policies may harm our business.

We operate our business globally in multiple countries that have policies and regulations relating to trade, immigration and currency, which may change. Governments may change their trade policies by withdrawing from negotiations on new trade policies, renegotiating existing trade agreements, imposing tariffs or imposing other trade restrictions or barriers. Any such changes may result in:

Any of these changes, changes in immigration policies, government intervention in currency valuation or other government policy changes may adversely impact our ability to sell software and services, which could, in turn, harm our revenues and our business. We are headquartered in the United States and may be particularly impacted by changes affecting the United States.

We are subject to governmental export and import controls that could impair our ability to compete in international markets due to licensing requirements and subject us to liability if we are not in compliance with applicable laws.

Our software, services and hardware are subject to export control and import laws and regulations. As a company headquartered in the United States we are subject to regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR, and Export Administration Regulations, or EAR, United States Customs regulations and various economic and trade sanctions regulations administered by the United States Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, presenting further risk of unexpected reporting and compliance costs. Compliance with these regulations may also prevent and restrict us from deriving revenue from potential customers in certain geographic locations for certain of our technologies.

If we fail to comply with these laws and regulations, we and certain of our employees could be subject to substantial civil or criminal penalties, including the possible loss of export or import privileges, fines which may be imposed on us and responsible employees or managers and, in extreme cases, the incarceration of responsible employees or managers. Obtaining the necessary authorizations, including any required license, for a particular sale may be time-consuming, is not guaranteed and may result in the delay or loss of sales opportunities. In addition, changes in our software or changes in applicable export or import regulations may create delays in the introduction and sale of our software in international markets, prevent our customers with international operations from deploying our software or, in some cases, prevent the export or import of our software to certain countries, governments or persons altogether.

We incorporate encryption technology into portions of our software. Various countries regulate the import of certain encryption technology, including through import permitting and licensing requirements, and have enacted laws that could limit our ability to distribute our software or could limit our customers’ ability to implement our software in those countries. Encrypted software and the underlying technology may also be subject to export control restrictions. Governmental regulation of encryption technology and regulation of imports or exports of encryption products, or our failure to obtain required import or export approval for our software, when applicable, could harm our international sales and adversely affect our revenue. Compliance with applicable regulatory requirements regarding the export of our software, including with respect to new releases of our software, may create delays in the introduction of our software in international markets, prevent our customers with international operations from deploying our software throughout their globally-distributed systems or, in some cases, prevent the export of our software to some countries altogether.

United States export control laws and economic sanction programs prohibit the shipment of certain software and services to countries, governments and persons that are subject to United States economic embargoes and trade sanctions, including, but not limited to, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Syria and Sudan. Any violations of such economic embargoes and trade sanction regulations could have negative consequences, including government investigations, penalties and reputational harm.

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Any change in export or import regulations, economic sanctions or related legislation, shift in the enforcement or scope of existing regulations, or change in the countries, governments, persons or technologies targeted by such regulations, could result in decreased use of our software by, or in our decreased ability to export or license our software to, existing or potential customers with international operations. Any decreased use of our software or limitation on our ability to export or license our software could adversely affect our business.

Our business is subject to a wide range of laws and regulations, and our failure to comply with those laws and regulations could harm our business.

Our business is subject to regulation by various federal, state, local and foreign governmental agencies, including agencies responsible for monitoring and enforcing employment and labor laws, workplace safety and environmental laws, privacy and data protection laws, financial services laws, anti-bribery laws, import and export controls, federal securities laws and tax laws and regulations. In certain foreign jurisdictions, these regulatory requirements may be more stringent than those in the United States. These laws and regulations are subject to change over time and thus we must continue to monitor and dedicate resources to ensure continued compliance. Non-compliance with applicable regulations or requirements could subject us to investigations, sanctions, mandatory product recalls, enforcement actions, disgorgement of profits, fines, damages, civil and criminal penalties or injunctions. If any governmental sanctions are imposed, or if we do not prevail in any possible civil or criminal litigation, our business, operating results, and financial condition could be materially adversely affected. In addition, responding to any action will likely result in a significant diversion of management’s attention and resources and an increase in professional fees. Enforcement actions and sanctions could harm our business, operating results and financial condition.

If we or any of our employees violate the FCPA, the U.K. Bribery Act or similar anti-bribery laws we could be adversely affected.

The FCPA, the U.K. Bribery Act and similar anti-bribery laws generally prohibit companies and their intermediaries from authorizing, offering or providing, directly or indirectly, improper payments or benefits for the purpose of obtaining or retaining business to government officials, political parties and private-sector recipients. United States based companies are required to maintain records that accurately and fairly represent their transactions and have an adequate system of internal accounting controls. We operate in areas of the world that potentially experience corruption by government officials to some degree and, in certain circumstances, compliance with anti-bribery laws may conflict with local customs and practices. We cannot assure that our employees, resellers or distributors will not engage in prohibited conduct. If we are found to be in violation of the FCPA, the U.K. Bribery Act or other anti-bribery laws, we could suffer criminal or civil penalties or other sanctions.

We have significant deferred tax assets in the United States, which we may not use in future taxable periods.

As of December 31, 2020 and 2019, we had gross deferred tax assets, or DTAs, of $133.4 million and $117.5 million, respectively, primarily related to net operating loss carryforwards, tax credits, share-based compensation, lease obligations and employee benefits. We are entitled to a United States federal tax deduction when non-qualified stock options, or NSOs, are exercised. In connection with our IPO, a significant number of NSOs were exercised resulting in a tax deduction for United States income tax purposes. This deduction, in conjunction with our other expected deferred tax asset reversals, resulted in the establishment of a valuation allowance for $47.0 million in 2017 for the United States DTAs. Our ability to utilize any net operating losses or tax credits may be limited under provisions of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, or the Code, if we undergo an ownership change after our IPO (generally defined as a greater than 50-percentage-point cumulative change, by value, in the equity ownership of certain stockholders over a rolling three-year period). We also inherited net operating losses, or NOLs, from the acquisition of Datawatch and Univa, which are subject to specific limitations on usage. We may or may not be able to realize the benefits of the acquired NOLs due to a number of factors, including those enumerated above. We may also be unable to realize our tax credit carryforwards prior to their expiry.

In addition, the recently enacted Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES Act and the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (CAA) provide relief to U.S. federal corporate taxpayers through temporary adjustments to net operating loss rules, changes to limitations on interest expense deductibility, and the acceleration of available refunds for minimum tax credit carryforwards. The CARES Act and the CAA did not have a material effect on the Company’s consolidated financial statements.

If our global tax methodology is challenged, our tax expense may increase.

As a global business headquartered in the United States, we are required to pay tax in a number of different countries, exposing us to transfer pricing and other adjustments. Transfer pricing refers to the methodology of allocating revenue and expenses for tax purposes to particular countries. Taxing authorities may challenge our transfer pricing methodology, which if successful could increase our professional expenses and result in one-time or recurring tax charges, a higher worldwide effective tax rate, reduced cash flows, and lower overall profitability of our operations.

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Our tax expense could be impacted depending on the applicability of withholding and other taxes including taxes on software licenses and related intercompany transactions under the tax laws of jurisdictions in which we have business operations. Our future income taxes may fluctuate if there is a change in the mix of income in the applicable tax jurisdictions in which we operate. We are subject to review and audit by the United States and other taxing authorities. Any review or audit could increase our professional expenses and, if determined adversely, could result in unexpected costs.

Sales and use, value-added and similar tax laws and rates vary by jurisdiction. Any of these jurisdictions may assert that such taxes are applicable, which could result in tax assessments, penalties and interest.

New legislation or tax-reform policies that would change U.S. or foreign taxation of international business activities, including uncertainties in the interpretation and application of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, could materially affect our tax obligations and effective tax rate.

We are subject to income tax in the numerous jurisdictions in which we operate. Reforming the taxation of international businesses has been a priority for politicians, and a wide variety of potential changes have been proposed. Some proposals, several of which have been enacted, impose incremental taxes on gross revenue, regardless of profitability. Furthermore, it is reasonable to expect that global taxing authorities will be reviewing current legislation for potential modifications in reaction to the implementation of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (the “Tax Act”) in the U.S. Due to the large and expanding scale of our international business activities, any changes in the taxation of such activities may increase our worldwide effective tax rate and the amount of taxes we pay and seriously harm our business.

In the U.S., the Tax Act enacted on December 22, 2017 significantly affected U.S. tax law by changing how the U.S. imposes income tax on multinational corporations. The U.S. Department of Treasury has broad authority to issue regulations and interpretative guidance that may significantly impact how we will apply the law and impact our results of operations in the period issued. It is possible that U.S. tax law will be modified by increasing corporate tax rates, eliminating, or modifying some of the provisions enacted in the 2017 Tax Act or other changes that could have an adverse effect on us.

The Tax Act requires complex computations not previously provided in U.S. tax law. As such, the application of accounting guidance for such items remain uncertain. Further, compliance with the Tax Act and the accounting for such provisions requires an accumulation of information not previously required or regularly produced. As additional regulatory guidance is issued by the applicable taxing authorities, as accounting treatment is clarified, and as we perform additional analysis on the application of the law, our effective tax rate could be materially different.

Our business may collect personal information and is subject to data protection laws.

Companies that collect personal information are required to comply with data protection laws adopted by the United States and various state and foreign jurisdictions, including the European Union General Data Protection Regulation and implementing legislation adopted by member states of the European Union (“GDPR”), and the United Kingdom Data Protection Act 2018 (the “UK GDPR”). These data protection laws regulate the collection, use, storage, disclosure and security of personal information, such as names, email addresses, Internet Protocol addresses and other online indentifiers, business contact data, and customer profiles, that may be used to identify or locate an individual, including a customer or an employee.

Data protection laws and regulations may require us to implement privacy and security policies, permit individuals to access, correct and delete their own personal information collected, stored or maintained by us, inform individuals of security breaches that affect their personal information, and, in some cases, obtain individuals’ consent to use or disclose their personal information for certain purposes. Governments could prohibit any personal information collected in a country from being transferred or disclosed outside of that country. We also may find it necessary or desirable to join industry or other self-regulatory bodies or other information security, or data protection, related organizations that require compliance with their rules pertaining to information security and data protection. We may agree to be bound by additional contractual obligations relating to our collection, use and disclosure of personal, financial and other data. Our failure to comply with these data protection laws or any actual or suspected security incident may result in governmental actions, fines and non-monetary penalties, or civil actions, which may harm our business.

On January 2, 2020, the California Consumer Privacy Act, or the CCPA, became effective. The CCPA protects the personal information of California residents, households and devices by placing certain requirements on the regulated businesses that collect, process, store and disclose personal information. The CCPA also provides for civil penalties for violations, as well as an individual private right of action in connection with data breaches that may result in more frequent data breach litigation, including class actions. The impact of this legislation is far-reaching and may require us to modify our data processing practices and policies and incur substantial costs and expenses in an effort to comply. In November 2020, California legislators approved the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA”), which substantially amends the CCPA. Among other developments, the CPRA created an entirely new state agency to enforce the CPRA and other state data privacy and security laws. The CPRA becomes effective in January 2023, but has a 12 month look back so regulated businesses must be compliant by January 1, 2022. Virginia recently adopted a data protection law which is

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currently scheduled to become effective in 2023. It remains unclear how the regulators, courts or commercial parties will interpret the CCPA, the CPRA or the Virginia Law. We may also be subject to new comprehensive data protection laws including legislation currently pending in other states including Washington and New York. We may also from time to time be subject to, or face assertions that we are subject to, additional obligations relating to personal information by contract or due to assertions that self-regulatory obligations or industry standards apply to our practices. Our failure to comply with any of these data protection laws self-regulatory obligations or industry standards or any actual or suspected security incident may result in governmental actions, fines and non-monetary penalties, or civil liability, which may harm our business.

Proposed or new legislation and regulations could significantly affect our business.

The GDPR, which became effective in May 2018, applies to all our business conducted in the European Economic Area (the “EEA”).  With Brexit in effect and the transition period having expired, our business in the United Kingdom is regulated by the U.K. GDPR. The GDPR and the U.K. GDPR (collectively, the “Regulations”) impose many obligations, and we will need to continue dedicating financial resources and management time to compliance and training in the coming years. The Regulations require, for example, that regulated entities expand disclosures about how personal data is used, mechanisms for obtaining consent from data subjects, controls for data subjects with respect to their personal data (including by enabling them to exercise rights to erasure and data portability), limitations on retention of personal data and mandatory data breach notifications. Additionally, the Regulations place companies under obligations relating to data transfers and the security of the personal data they process and there are substantial fines and penalties associated with infringement. For example, the GDPR provides that supervisory authorities in the European Union may impose administrative fines for certain infringements of the GDPR (up to EUR 20,000,000, or 4% of an undertaking’s total, worldwide, annual revenue, whichever is higher). Individuals who sustain damages because a regulated entity fails to comply with the GDPR have the right to seek compensation from such entity directly. Compliance with the Regulations and continued monitoring and training will require significant expenditure of resources on an ongoing basis, and there can be no assurance that the measures we have taken for the purposes of compliance will be successful in preventing infringements thereof. Given the potential fines, liabilities and damage to our reputation in the event of an actual or perceived infringement of the Regulations, such an infringement may have an adverse effect on our business and operations.

As the number of jurisdictions with data privacy regulations increase and our global footprint expands, it may be necessary for us to increase the amount we expend on compliance and training in this area.

Risks related to ownership of our Class A common stock

An active public trading market for our Class A common stock may not be sustained.

Prior to our initial public offering in the fourth quarter of 2017, there had been no public market or active private market for trading shares of our Class A common stock. Our Class A common stock is listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “ALTR.” However, we cannot assure you that an active trading market will be sustained. The lack of an active market may impair your ability to sell your shares at the time you wish to sell them or at a price that you consider reasonable. The lack of an active market may also reduce the price of shares of Class A common stock. An inactive market may impair our ability to raise capital by selling shares and our ability to use our capital stock to acquire other companies or technologies. We cannot predict the prices at which our Class A common stock will trade.

The market price of our Class A common stock can be volatile.

The market price of our Class A common stock has and may continue to fluctuate from time to time. Our market price may continue to fluctuate substantially depending on a number of factors, many of which are beyond our control and may not be related to our operating performance. These fluctuations could cause you to lose all or part of your investment in our Class A common stock, since you might not be able to sell your shares at or above the price you paid for our Class A common stock. Factors that could cause fluctuations in the market price of our Class A common stock include the following:

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In addition, the stock market in general, and the market for technology companies in particular, have experienced extreme price and volume fluctuations that have often been unrelated or disproportionate to the operating performance of those companies. Broad market and industry factors may affect the market price of our Class A common stock, regardless of our actual operating performance. In the past, following periods of volatility in the overall market and the market prices of a particular company’s securities, securities class action litigation has often been instituted against that company. We may become the target of this type of litigation in the future. Securities litigation, if instituted against us, could result in substantial costs and divert our management’s attention and resources from our business.

We do not intend to pay dividends in the foreseeable future. As a result, your ability to achieve a return on your investment will depend on appreciation in the price of our Class A common stock.

We have never declared or paid any cash dividends on our Class A common stock. We currently intend to retain all available funds and any future earnings for use in the operation of our business and do not anticipate paying any dividends on our Class A common stock in the foreseeable future. Any determination to pay dividends in the future will be at the discretion of our board of directors. Consequently, your only opportunity to achieve a return on your investment in our company will be if the market price of our Class A common stock appreciates and you sell your shares at a profit. There is no guarantee that the price of our Class A common stock that will prevail in the market will ever exceed the price that you paid.

If we fail to maintain effective internal controls, we may not be able to report financial results accurately or on a timely basis, or to detect fraud, which could have a material adverse effect on our business or share price.

Effective internal controls are necessary for us to provide reasonable assurance with respect to our financial reports and to effectively prevent financial fraud. Pursuant to SOX, we are required to periodically evaluate the effectiveness of the design and operation of our internal controls. Internal controls over financial reporting may not prevent or detect misstatements because of inherent limitations, including the possibility of human error or collusion, the circumvention or overriding of controls, or fraud. If we fail to maintain an effective system of internal controls, our business and operating results could be harmed, and we could fail to meet our reporting obligations, which could have a material adverse effect on our business and our share price.

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As a public company, we are required to maintain internal controls over financial reporting and to report any material weaknesses in such internal controls. Section 404 of SOX requires annual management assessments of the effectiveness of our internal controls over financial reporting. We have designed, implemented and tested the internal control over financial reporting required to comply with this obligation, which was and is time consuming, costly, and complicated. A material weakness is defined as a deficiency, or combination of deficiencies, in internal control over financial reporting, such that there is a reasonable possibility that a material misstatement of our annual or interim financial statements will not be prevented or detected on a timely basis. In the past, we have identified material weaknesses in our controls which we subsequently remediated. We cannot assure investors that we will not have material weaknesses in the future. If we identify material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting in the future or if we are unable to successfully remediate the identified material weaknesses or, if we are unable to comply with the requirements of Section 404 in a timely manner or assert that our internal control over financial reporting is effective, investors may lose confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports and the market price of our Class A common stock could be negatively affected, and we could become subject to investigations by the stock exchange on which our securities are listed, the SEC, or other regulatory authorities, which could require additional financial and management resources.

We cannot predict the impact our capital structure may have on our stock price.

In July 2017, S&P Dow Jones, a provider of widely followed stock indices, announced that companies with multiple share classes, such as ours, will not be eligible for inclusion in certain of their indices. As a result, our Class A common stock will likely not be eligible for these stock indices. Additionally, FTSE Russell, another provider of widely followed stock indices, has stated that it plans to require new constituents of its indices to have at least five percent of their voting rights in the hands of public stockholders. Many investment funds are precluded from investing in companies that are not included in such indices, and these funds would be unable to purchase our Class A common stock. We cannot assure you that other stock indices will not take a similar approach to S&P Dow Jones or FTSE Russell in the future. Given the sustained flow of investment funds into passive strategies that seek to track certain indexes, exclusion from indices could make our Class A common stock less attractive to investors. As a result, the market price of our Class A common stock could be adversely affected.

If financial or industry analysts do not publish research or reports about our business or if they issue inaccurate or unfavorable commentary or downgrade our Class A common stock, our stock price and trading volume could decline.

The trading market for our Class A common stock may be influenced by the research and reports that industry or financial analysts publish about us or our business. We do not control these analysts, or the content and opinions included in their reports. As a relatively new public company, we may be slow to attract research coverage, and the analysts who publish information about our Class A common stock still have relatively little experience with our company, which could affect their ability to accurately forecast our results and make it more likely that we fail to meet their estimates. If any of the analysts who cover us issue an inaccurate or unfavorable opinion regarding our stock price, our stock price would likely decline. In addition, the stock prices of many companies in the technology industry have declined significantly after those companies have failed to meet, or often times failed to exceed, the financial guidance publicly announced by the companies or the expectations of analysts. If our financial results fail to meet, or fail to significantly exceed, our announced guidance or the expectations of analysts or public investors, analysts could downgrade our Class A common stock or publish unfavorable research about us. If one or more of these analysts cease coverage of our company or fail to publish reports on us regularly, we could lose visibility in the financial markets, which in turn could cause our stock price or trading volume to decline.

Future sales of substantial amounts of our Class A common stock may cause our stock price to decline.

Future sales of a substantial number of shares of our Class A common stock, particularly sales by our directors, executive officers and significant stockholders could adversely affect the market price of our Class A common stock and may make it more difficult to sell Class A common stock at a time and price that you deem appropriate. As of December 31, 2020, we had an aggregate of 44,215,900 shares of Class A common stock and 30,110,732 shares of Class B common stock outstanding.

All of the shares of Class A common stock sold in our initial public offering and June 2018 follow-on public offering are freely tradable without restrictions or further registration under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or the Securities Act, except for any shares held by our affiliates as defined in Rule 144 under the Securities Act.

Shares held by directors, executive officers and other affiliates are subject to volume limitations under Rule 144 under the Securities Act and various vesting agreements.

We have registered the offer and sale of an aggregate of approximately 22,132,893 shares of Class A common stock that have been issued or reserved for future issuance under our equity compensation plans on a Form S-8 registration statement. These shares can be freely sold in the public market upon issuance, unless they are held by “affiliates,” as that term is defined in Rule 144 of the Securities Act. Additionally, the number of shares of Class A common stock available for grant and issuance under our 2017 Equity Incentive Plan is subject to an automatic annual increase on January 1 of each year beginning in 2018 by an amount equal to the lesser of (i) 3% of the number of shares of all classes of our common stock outstanding on December 31 of the preceding calendar year or (ii) a lesser number of shares of Class A common stock determined by our board of directors. We also intend to register the offer and sale of any

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shares of Class A common stock resulting from such increases. If the holders of these shares choose to sell a large number of shares, they could adversely affect the market price for our Class A common stock.

We may also issue shares of our Class A common stock or securities convertible into shares of our Class A common stock from time to time in connection with a financing, acquisition, investment or otherwise. Any such issuance could result in substantial dilution to our existing stockholders and cause the trading price of our Class A common stock to decline.

The dual class structure of our common stock has the effect of concentrating voting control with certain stockholders who hold shares of our Class B common stock, including our founders, certain of our directors and executive officers and affiliates, who hold in the aggregate approximately 87% of the voting power of our capital stock. This will limit or preclude your ability to influence corporate matters, including the election of directors, amendments of our organizational documents, and any merger, consolidation, sale of all or substantially all of our assets, or other major corporate transaction requiring stockholder approval.

Our Class B common stock has ten votes per share, and our Class A common stock has one vote per share. Our Class B stockholders, including our founders, certain of our directors and executive officers, and affiliates, hold, in the aggregate approximately 87% of the voting power of our capital stock. The ten-to-one voting ratio between our Class B and Class A common stock, results in the holders of our Class B common stock collectively controlling a majority of the combined voting power of our common stock and therefore being able to control all matters submitted to our stockholders for approval until 2029, or upon the occurrence of a triggering event at which time all shares of our Class B common stock will automatically convert into shares of our Class A common stock, or on an earlier date, as set forth in our Delaware certificate of incorporation.

This concentrated control will limit or preclude your ability to influence corporate matters for the foreseeable future, including the election of directors, amendments of our organizational documents, and any merger, consolidation, sale of all or substantially all of our assets, or other major corporate transaction requiring stockholder approval. In addition, this may prevent or discourage unsolicited acquisition proposals or offers for our capital stock that you may feel are in your best interest as one of our stockholders.

Future transfers by holders of our Class B common stock will generally result in those shares converting to Class A common stock, subject to the specific exceptions set forth in our Delaware certificate of incorporation, such as certain transfers effected for estate planning purposes and between or among our founders. The conversion of Class B common stock to Class A common stock will have the effect, over time, of increasing the relative voting power of those holders of Class B common stock who retain their shares in the long-term.

Certain provisions in our charter documents and Delaware law could prevent an acquisition of our company, limit attempts by our stockholders to replace or remove members of our board of directors or current management and may adversely affect the market price of our Class A common stock.

Our Delaware certificate of incorporation and bylaws contain provisions that could delay or prevent a change in control of our company that stockholders may consider favorable, including transactions in which stockholders might otherwise receive a premium for their shares. These provisions may also prevent or delay attempts by stockholders to replace or remove our current management or members of our board of directors. These provisions include:

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In addition, as a Delaware corporation, we are subject to Section 203 of the Delaware General Corporation Law. These provisions may prohibit large stockholders, in particular those owning 15% or more of our outstanding voting stock, from merging or combining with us for a certain period of time.

These and other provisions in our certificate of incorporation, our bylaws and under Delaware law could discourage potential takeover attempts, reduce the price that investors might be willing to pay for shares of our Class A common stock in the future and result in the market price being lower than it would be without these provisions.

Risks Related to Our Indebtedness

Our 0.250% Convertible Senior Notes due 2024, or the Convertible Notes, are effectively subordinated to our secured debt and any liabilities of our subsidiaries.

The Convertible Notes rank senior in right of payment to any of our indebtedness that is expressly subordinated in right of payment to the Convertible Notes; equal in right of payment to any of our liabilities that are not so subordinated; effectively junior in right of payment to any of our secured indebtedness (including all amounts outstanding under our revolving credit facility) to the extent of the value of the assets securing such indebtedness; and structurally junior to all indebtedness and other liabilities (including trade payables) of our subsidiaries. In the event of our bankruptcy, liquidation, reorganization or other winding up, our assets that secure debt ranking senior or equal in right of payment to the Convertible Notes (including all amounts outstanding under our revolving credit facility) will be available to pay obligations on the Convertible Notes only after the secured debt has been repaid in full from these assets, and the assets of our subsidiaries will be available to pay obligations on the Convertible Notes only after all claims senior to the Convertible Notes have been repaid in full. There may not be sufficient assets remaining to pay amounts due on any or all of the Convertible Notes then outstanding. The indenture governing the Convertible Notes will not prohibit us from incurring additional senior debt or secured debt, nor does it prohibit any of our subsidiaries from incurring additional liabilities.

The Convertible Notes are our obligations only and a substantial portion of our operations are conducted through, and a substantial portion of our consolidated assets are held by, our subsidiaries.

The Convertible Notes are our obligations exclusively and are not guaranteed by any of our operating subsidiaries. A substantial portion of our operations is conducted through, and a substantial portion of our consolidated assets is held by, our subsidiaries. Accordingly, our ability to service our debt, including the Convertible Notes, depends in part on the results of operations of our subsidiaries and upon the ability of such subsidiaries to provide us with cash, whether in the form of dividends, loans or otherwise, to pay amounts due on our obligations, including the Convertible Notes. Our subsidiaries are separate and distinct legal entities and have no obligation, contingent or otherwise, to make payments on the Convertible Notes or to make any funds available for that purpose. In addition, dividends, loans or other distributions to us from such subsidiaries may be subject to contractual and other restrictions and are subject to other business considerations.

Servicing our debt will require a significant amount of cash, and we may not have sufficient cash flow from our business to pay our substantial debt.

Our ability to make scheduled payments of the principal of, to pay interest on, or to refinance our future indebtedness, including the amounts payable under our revolving credit facility and the Convertible Notes, depends on our future performance, which is subject to economic, financial, competitive and other factors beyond our control. Our business may not continue to generate cash flow from operations in the future sufficient to service our debt and make necessary capital expenditures. If we are unable to generate such cash flow, we may be required to adopt one or more alternatives, such as selling assets, restructuring debt or obtaining additional equity capital on terms that may be onerous or highly dilutive. Our ability to refinance our indebtedness will depend on the capital markets and our financial condition at such time. We may not be able to engage in any of these activities or engage in these activities on desirable terms, which could result in a default on our debt obligations. In addition, any of our future debt agreements may contain restrictive covenants that may prohibit us from adopting any of these alternatives. Our failure to comply with these covenants could result in an event of default which, if not cured or waived, could result in the acceleration of our debt.

We may still incur substantially more debt or take other actions which would intensify the risks discussed above.

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We and our subsidiaries may be able to incur substantial additional debt in the future, subject to the restrictions contained in our debt instruments, some of which may be secured debt. We will not be restricted under the terms of the indenture governing the Convertible Notes from incurring additional debt, securing existing or future debt, recapitalizing our debt or taking a number of other actions that are not limited by the terms of the indenture governing the Convertible Notes that could have the effect of diminishing our ability to make payments on the Convertible Notes when due. Our existing revolving credit facility restricts our ability to incur additional indebtedness, including secured indebtedness, but if the facility matures or is repaid, we may not be subject to such restrictions under the terms of any subsequent indebtedness.

We may not have the ability to raise the funds necessary to settle conversions of the Convertible Notes in cash or to repurchase the Convertible Notes upon a fundamental change, and our current debt contains, and our future debt may contain, limitations on our ability to pay cash upon conversion or repurchase of the Convertible Notes.

Holders of the Convertible Notes will have the right to require us to repurchase their Convertible Notes upon the occurrence of a fundamental change at a defined repurchase price equal to 100% of the principal amount of the Convertible Notes to be repurchased, plus accrued and unpaid interest, if any. In addition, upon conversion of the Convertible Notes, unless we elect to deliver solely shares of our Class A common stock to settle such conversion (other than paying cash in lieu of delivering any fractional share), we will be required to make cash payments in respect of the Convertible Notes being converted. However, we may not have enough available cash or be able to obtain financing at the time we are required to make repurchases of Convertible Notes surrendered therefor or Convertible Notes being converted.

In addition, our ability to repurchase the Convertible Notes or to pay cash upon conversions of the Convertible Notes may be limited by law, by regulatory authority or by agreements governing our indebtedness including our existing revolving credit facility. Our failure to repurchase Convertible Notes at a time when the repurchase is required by the indenture or to pay any cash payable on future conversions of the Convertible Notes as required by the indenture would constitute a default under the indenture. A default under the indenture or the occurrence of a fundamental change itself would likely also lead to a default under our revolving credit facility and may lead to a default under agreements governing our future indebtedness. If the repayment of the related indebtedness were to be accelerated after any applicable notice or grace periods, we may not have sufficient funds to repay the indebtedness and repurchase the Convertible Notes or make cash payments upon conversions thereof.

Our revolving credit facility limits our ability to pay any cash amount upon the conversion or repurchase of the Convertible Notes.

Our existing revolving credit facility prohibits us from making any cash payments on the conversion or repurchase of the Convertible Notes if a default under such credit facility exists or would be created thereby. In addition, our ability to make cash payments on the conversion or repurchase of the Convertible Notes will be limited to the extent we do not satisfy certain financial covenant tests after giving effect to such payments. Any new credit facility that we may enter into may have similar restrictions. Our failure to make cash payments upon the conversion or repurchase of the Convertible Notes as required under the terms of the Convertible Notes would permit holders of the Convertible Notes to accelerate our obligations under the Convertible Notes.

Our loan agreements contain operating and financial covenants that may restrict our business and financing activities.

Our credit agreement, as amended, provides for an initial aggregate commitment amount of $150 million, with a sublimit for the issuance of letters of credit of up to $5 million and a sublimit for swing line loans of up to $5 million and matures on December 15, 2023 (the “2019 Amended Credit Agreement”). Our 2019 Amended Credit Agreement is unconditionally guaranteed by us and all existing and subsequently acquired controlled domestic subsidiaries. It is also collateralized by a first priority, perfected security interest in, and mortgages on, substantially all of our tangible assets. The 2019 Amended Credit Agreement contains operating financial restrictions and covenants, including liens, limitations on indebtedness, fundamental changes, limitations on guarantees, limitations on sales of assets and sales of receivables, dividends, distributions and other restricted payments, transactions with affiliates, prepayment of indebtedness and limitations on loans and investments in each case subject to certain exceptions. In addition, the 2019 Amended Credit Agreement contains financial covenants relating to maintaining a minimum interest coverage ratio of 3.0 to 1.0, a maximum senior secured leverage ratio of 3.0 to 1.0, and maximum net leverage ratio of 5.0 to 1.0, as defined in the 2019 Amended Credit Agreement. The restrictions and covenants in the 2019 Amended Credit Agreement, as well as those contained in any future debt financing agreements that we may enter into, may restrict our ability to finance our operations and engage in, expand or otherwise pursue our business activities and strategies. Our ability to comply with these covenants and restrictions may be affected by events beyond our control, and breaches of these covenants and restrictions could result in a default under the loan agreement and any future financing agreements that we may enter into.

The conditional conversion feature of the Convertible Notes, if triggered, may adversely affect our financial condition and operating results.

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In the event the conditional conversion feature of the Convertible Notes is triggered, holders of Convertible Notes will be entitled to convert the Convertible Notes at any time during specified periods at their option. If one or more holders elect to convert their Convertible Notes, unless we elect to satisfy our conversion obligation by delivering solely shares of our Class A common stock (other than paying cash in lieu of delivering any fractional share), we would be required to settle a portion or all of our conversion obligation through the payment of cash, which could adversely affect our liquidity. In addition, even if holders of the Convertible Notes do not elect to convert their Convertible Notes, we could be required under applicable accounting rules to reclassify all or a portion of the outstanding principal of the Convertible Notes as a current rather than long-term liability, which would result in a material reduction of our net working capital.

If the last reported sale price of our Class A Common Stock for at least 20 trading days (whether or not consecutive) during a period of 30 consecutive trading days ending on, and including, the last trading day of the immediately preceding calendar quarter is greater than or equal to 130% of the conversion price on each applicable trading day, our Convertible Notes will be convertible in the next calendar quarter (the “Sale Price Condition”). At present, the conversion price is approximately $46.50; 130% of such price is approximately $60.45. The closing sale price of our Class A common stock has met or exceeded $60.45 during the current or future calendar quarters, although we cannot presently determine whether the Sale Price Condition will be satisfied with respect to the current calendar quarter. If the Sale Price Condition is satisfied during the current or future calendar quarters, our Convertible Notes will be convertible during the succeeding calendar quarter.

The accounting method for convertible debt securities that may be settled in cash, such as the Convertible Notes, could have a material effect on our reported financial results.

Under Financial Accounting Standards Board Accounting Standards Codification 470-20, Debt with Conversion and Other Options (“ASC 470-20”), an entity must separately account for the liability and equity components of the convertible debt instruments (such as the Convertible Notes) that may be settled entirely or partially in cash upon conversion in a manner that reflects the issuer’s economic interest cost. The effect of ASC 470-20 on the accounting for the Convertible Notes is that the equity component is required to be included in the additional paid-in capital section of stockholders’ equity on our consolidated balance sheet, and the value of the equity component would be treated as debt discount for purposes of accounting for the debt component of the Convertible Notes. As a result, we will be required to record a greater amount of non-cash interest expense in current periods presented as a result of the amortization of the discounted carrying value of the Convertible Notes to their face amount over the term of the Convertible Notes. We will report larger net losses (or lower net income) in our financial results because ASC 470-20 will require interest to include both the current period’s amortization of the debt discount and the instrument’s coupon interest, which could adversely affect our reported or future financial results, the trading price of our Class A common stock and the trading price of the Convertible Notes.

In addition, under certain circumstances, convertible debt instruments (such as the Convertible Notes) that may be settled entirely or partly in cash are currently accounted for utilizing the treasury stock method, the effect of which is that the shares issuable upon conversion of the Convertible Notes are not included in the calculation of diluted earnings per share except to the extent that the conversion value of the Convertible Notes exceeds their principal amount. Under the treasury stock method, for diluted earnings per share purposes, the transaction is accounted for as if the number of shares of Class A common stock that would be necessary to settle such excess, if we elected to settle such excess in shares, are issued. As our stock price increases, the number of shares of Class A common stock used in the computation of fully diluted earnings per share also increases, which will adversely affect our diluted earnings per share.

In August 2020, the Financial Accounting Standards Board issued Accounting Standards Update 2020-06, ASC Subtopic 470-20, Debt — Debt with Conversion and Other Options and Accounting Standards Codification subtopic 815-40, Hedging — Contracts in Entity's Own Equity, that change the accounting for the convertible debt instruments. Under the new standard, an entity may no longer separately account for the liability and equity components of convertible debt instruments. Additionally, the guidance eliminates the treasury stock method to calculate diluted earnings per share for convertible debt instruments and requires the use of the “if converted” method. Application of the “if converted” method may negatively affect our diluted earnings per share. The standard is effective for fiscal years beginning after December 15, 2021, including interim periods within those fiscal years and early adoption is permitted.

Transactions relating to the Convertible Notes may affect the value of our Class A common stock.

The conversion of some or all of the Convertible Notes would dilute the ownership interests of existing stockholders to the extent we satisfy our conversion obligation by delivering shares of our Class A common stock upon any conversion of the Convertible Notes.  If holders of our Convertible Notes elect to convert their notes, we may settle our conversion obligation by delivering to them a significant number of shares of our Class A common stock, which would cause dilution to our existing stockholders.

General Risk Factors

If we are unable to attract and retain key personnel, we may be unable to achieve our business objectives.

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Our business is dependent on our ability to attract and retain highly skilled software engineers, data scientists, salespeople, and support teams. There is significant industry competition for these individuals. We have many employees whose equity awards in our company are fully vested and may increase their personal wealth, which could affect their decision to remain with the Company. Failure to attract or retain key personnel could delay or prevent the achievement of our business objectives.

We may require additional capital to support our business, which may not be available on acceptable terms.

We expect to continue to make investments in our business, which may require us to raise additional funds. We may raise these funds through either equity or debt financings. Issuances of equity or convertible debt securities may significantly dilute stockholders and any new equity securities could have rights, preferences and privileges superior to those holders of our Class A common stock. In addition to the restrictions under our current credit agreement, any future debt financings could contain restrictive covenants relating to our capital raising activities and other financial and operational matters, which may make it more difficult for us to obtain additional capital, manage our business and pursue business opportunities, including potential acquisitions.

We may not be able to obtain additional financing on terms favorable to us. If we are unable to obtain adequate financing or financing on terms satisfactory to us when we require it, our ability to continue to support our growth, develop new software or add capabilities and enhancements to our existing software and respond to business challenges could be significantly impaired, and our business may be adversely affected.

The estimates of market opportunity and forecasts of market growth included in our periodic reports or other public disclosures may prove to be inaccurate, and even if the market in which we compete achieves the forecasted growth, our business could fail to grow at similar rates, if at all.

Market opportunity estimates and growth forecasts included in our periodic reports or other public disclosures, including those we have generated ourselves, are subject to significant uncertainty and are based on assumptions and estimates that may not prove to be accurate. Even if the market in which we compete meets the size estimates and growth forecasted in our periodic reports or other public disclosures, our business could fail to grow for a variety of reasons, which would adversely affect our results of operations.

Business interruptions could adversely affect our business.

Our operations and our customers are vulnerable to interruptions by fire, flood, earthquake, power loss, telecommunications failure, terrorist attacks, wars, pandemics, environmental and climate change, and other events beyond our control. A catastrophic event that results in the destruction of any of our critical business or information technology systems could severely affect our ability to conduct normal business operations, including system interruptions, reputational harm, delays in our software development, breaches of data security and loss of critical data.

We rely on our network and third-party infrastructure and applications, internal technology systems, and our websites for our development, marketing, operational support, hosted services and sales activities. If these systems were to fail or be negatively impacted as a result of a natural disaster or other event, our ability to deliver software and training to our customers could be impaired.

Our business interruption insurance may not be sufficient to compensate us fully for losses or damages that may occur as a result of these events, if at all.

Our reported financial results may be adversely affected by changes in accounting principles generally accepted in the United States.

GAAP are subject to interpretation by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, or FASB, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC, and various bodies formed to promulgate and interpret appropriate accounting principles. A change in these principles or interpretations could have a significant effect on our reported financial results for periods prior and subsequent to such change. The adoption of new standards may require enhancements or changes in our systems and will continue to require significant time and effort of our financial management team.

We cannot predict the impact of all of the future changes to accounting principles or our accounting policies on our consolidated financial statements going forward, which could have a significant effect on our reported financial results, and could affect the reporting of transactions completed before the announcement of the change. In addition, if we were to change our critical accounting estimates, including those related to the recognition of license revenue and other revenue sources, our operating results could be significantly affected.

Item 1B. Unresolved Staff Comments

None.

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Item 2. Properties

Our corporate headquarters are located in Troy, Michigan. We own our corporate headquarters facility, a building in Korea, and an undeveloped parcel of land adjacent to our headquarters, which we may develop over the next few years.

We lease or sublease all of our other domestic and international offices. We expect to add facilities as we grow our employee base and expand geographically. We do not manage our facilities by segment because they may be used for multiple purposes, such as administration, sales, and development. We believe that our facilities are adequate to meet our needs for the immediate future, and that, should it be needed, suitable additional space will be available to accommodate expansion of our operations.

Item 3. Legal Proceedings

From time to time, we may be subject to legal proceedings and claims in the ordinary course of business. We have received, and may in the future continue to receive, claims from third parties asserting, among other things, infringement of their intellectual property rights. Future litigation may be necessary to defend ourselves, our partners and our customers by determining the scope, enforceability and validity of third party proprietary rights, or to establish and enforce our proprietary rights. The results of any current or future litigation cannot be predicted with certainty and regardless of the outcome, litigation can have an adverse impact on us because of defense and settlement costs, diversion of management resources and other factors.

Swedish Tax Litigation

The Swedish Tax Authorities, or STA, assessed tax (net of utilization of tax attributes) penalties and interest in the amount of $6.2 million related to the acquisition of Panopticon AB by Datawatch Corporation, in 2013 for the years 2013, 2014 and 2015. The STA, upon auditing the acquisition transaction, reached a conclusion that post acquisition, certain assets were removed from Sweden, triggering the tax obligation. The STA is also of the opinion that some services related to product development provided to the new parent company in the U.S. were performed by Panopticon AB at a price below market price triggering tax obligations. Datawatch contested the findings by the STA throughout the audit process including contesting the STA position in the first level of administrative courts. On May 29, 2019, the Administrative Court issued its ruling in favor of Datawatch AB. On July 4, 2019, the STA filed an appeal of the Administrative Court ruling with the Administrative Court of Appeals in Stockholm, effectively continuing to assert that the assessments are in fact appropriate. After relevant submissions by the Company and the STA, the Court of Appeals held a hearing on February 20, 2020. 

On March 27, 2020, the Court of Appeals issued its finding in favor of the STA. Pursuant to requirements in Sweden, the Company paid the assessed tax, penalties and interest on April 24, 2020. The Company, in accordance with its right to appeal the ruling to the Administrative Supreme Court of Sweden, filed an appeal of the Court of Appeals ruling citing specific grounds for reconsideration.  On November 4, 2020, the Supreme Administrative Court issued a decision that they would not grant leave to appeal, effectively eliminating any further appeal rights in this matter.

Item 4. Mine Safety Disclosures

Not applicable.

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PART II

Item 5. Market for Registrant’s Common Equity, Related Stockholder Matters and Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities

Market Information for Common Stock

Our Class A common stock began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “ALTR” on November 1, 2017. Prior to that date, there was no public trading market for our Class A common stock.

Our Class B common stock is not listed nor traded on any stock exchange.

Holders

As of February 15, 2021, there were 35 registered stockholders of our Class A common stock and 4 registered stockholders of our Class B common stock. We are unable to estimate the total number of stockholders because many of our shares of Class A common stock are held by brokers, banks or other institutions on behalf of stockholders.

Dividends

We have never declared or paid any cash dividends on our common stock. We currently intend to retain all available funds and any future earnings for use in the operation of our business and do not anticipate paying any dividends on our common stock in the foreseeable future. The terms of our 2019 Amended Credit Agreement also restrict our ability to pay dividends, and we may also enter into credit agreements or other borrowing arrangements in the future that will restrict our ability to declare or pay cash dividends on our capital stock. Any future determination regarding the declaration and payment of dividends, if any, will be at the discretion of our board of directors and will depend on then-existing conditions, including our financial condition, operating results, contractual restrictions, capital requirements, business prospects, and other factors our board of directors may deem relevant. There can be no assurance that any dividends will be paid in the future.

Unregistered Sales of Equity Securities

On September 9, 2020, and November 23, 2020, in connection with the acquisition of Ellexus, the Company issued to shareholders of Ellexus an aggregate of 41,210 shares of the Company’s Class A Common Stock, par value $0.0001 per share. All shares were issued without registration under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the “Securities Act”), pursuant to Section 4(a)(2) of the Securities Act. Ellexus’s existing stockholders provided customary representations for a private placement of securities and agreed to customary restrictions on transferability.

On October 7, 2020, in connection with the acquisition of M-Base, the Company issued to shareholders of M-Base an aggregate of 30,000 shares of the Company’s Class A Common Stock, par value $0.0001 per share. All shares were issued without registration under the Securities Act, pursuant to Section 4(a)(2) of the Securities Act. M-Base’s existing stockholders provided customary representations for a private placement of securities and agreed to customary restrictions on transferability.

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Performance Graph

The following shall not be deemed “filed” for purposes of Section 18 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or incorporated by reference into any of our other filings under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Securities Act .

The graph below compares the cumulative total stockholder return on our Class A common stock with the cumulative total return on the Nasdaq Composite Index and the Nasdaq Computer Index. The graph assumes $100 was invested at the market close on November 1, 2017, which was our initial trading day, in our Class A common stock, the Nasdaq Composite Index and the Nasdaq Computer Index.

Data for the Nasdaq Composite Index and the Nasdaq Computer Index assumes reinvestment of dividends. The offering price of our Class A common stock in our IPO, which had a closing stock price of $18.31, was $13.00 per share.

The comparisons in the graph below are based upon historical data and are not indicative of, nor intended to forecast, future performance of our Class A common stock.

Item 6. Selected Financial Data

Not applicable.

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Item 7.  Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations

The following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations should be read in conjunction with our audited consolidated financial statements (and notes thereto) for the year ended December 31, 2020 included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. This discussion contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Our actual results could differ materially from those discussed below. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, those identified below and those discussed in “Risk factors” and “Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements” included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Overview

We are a global technology company providing software and cloud solutions in the areas of simulation, high-performance computing (“HPC”), data analytics, and artificial intelligence (“AI”). We enable organizations across broad industry segments to compete more effectively in a connected world while creating a more sustainable future.

Our simulation and AI-driven approach to innovation is powered by our broad portfolio of high-fidelity and high-performance physics solvers, our market-leading technology for optimization and HPC, and our end-to-end platform for developing AI and Internet of Things (“IoT”) solutions. Our integrated suite of software optimizes design performance across multiple disciplines encompassing structures, motion, fluids, thermal, electromagnetics, system modeling, and embedded systems, while also providing AI solutions and true-to-life visualization and rendering. Our HPC solutions maximize the efficient utilization of complex compute resources and streamline the workflow management of compute-intensive tasks for applications including AI, modeling and simulation, and visualization. Our data analytics, AI and IoT products include data preparation, data science, MLOps, orchestration, and visualization solutions that fuel engineering, scientific, and business decisions.

Altair’s software products represent a comprehensive, open architecture solution for simulation, HPC, data analytics, and AI to empower decision making for improved product design and development, manufacturing, energy management and exploration, financial services, health care, and retail operations. We believe Altair’s solutions are compelling due to their openness and usability.

Altair’s products offer a comprehensive set of technologies to design and optimize high-performance, efficient, innovative and sustainable products and processes in an increasingly connected world. Our products are categorized by:

Altair also provides Client Engineering Services, or CES, to support our customers with long-term ongoing expertise. This has the benefit of embedding us within customers, deepening our understanding of their processes, and allowing us to more quickly perceive trends in the overall market. Our presence at our customers’ sites helps us to better tailor our software products’ research and development, or R&D, and sales initiatives.

Licensing

There are two licensing methods we employ to deliver our software solutions:  

Altair pioneered a patented units-based subscription licensing model for software and other digital content. This units-based subscription licensing model allows flexible and shared access to our offerings, along with over 150 partner products. Our customers license a pool of units for their organizations giving individual users access to our entire portfolio of software applications as well as our growing portfolio of partner products. We believe our units-based subscription licensing model lowers barriers to adoption, creates broad engagement, encourages users to work within our ecosystem, and increases revenue. This, in turn, helps drive our recurring software license rate which has been on average approximately 89% over the past five years. Each year approximately 60% of new software revenue comes from expansion within existing customers.

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Recent Business Developments

Impact of COVID-19

In March 2020, The World Health Organization declared the outbreak of COVID-19, a pandemic and a public health emergency of international concern. The global spread of COVID-19 has created significant volatility and uncertainty. Such conditions are expected to continue. To limit the spread of COVID-19, governments have taken various actions, from time to time, including the issuance of travel restrictions, complete or partial prohibitions of non-essential activities, restrictions or shutdowns of non-essential businesses, stay-at-home orders and social distancing guidelines. Some of these actions have varied from initial responses, pivoting between full or complete to partial or limited restrictions depending upon local or regional conditions. Accordingly, many businesses have adjusted to these actions by reducing or suspending operating or other activities. This has negatively impacted several of the markets we serve, including the automotive and aerospace markets.

The ensuing discussion is provided to summarize the impacts of COVID-19 upon the Company, inclusive of some of the principal measures undertaken by the Company to date to respond to the pandemic. It is difficult to predict with any level of precision the broad effects of COVID-19 on specific industries or individual companies. Locally or regionally imposed restrictions in concert with the duration of pandemic conditions, along with the development and distribution of vaccines, may create disparate impacts across the globe, including the primary countries or regions in which the Company and its customers operate.

The uncertain impact from the rapidly changing market and economic conditions due to COVID-19 has disrupted the business of many of our customers and partners. These disruptions have had an adverse effect on our business and consolidated results of operations and could impact our financial condition in the future. For example, a negative impact on our customers may cause them to delay entering into new or expanded software licenses, request extended payment terms, delayed invoicing, higher discounts, lower renewal amounts or cancelations, and a reduction in demand for software related and client engineering services. These actions could have a negative impact on our financial results and liquidity. While adjustments to costs in previous periods have been undertaken to mitigate the potential loss of revenue, including through the reduction in use of outside contractors and furloughing those employees associated with client engineering services for whom their associated customer contracts were interrupted or terminated, we believe that it is important on a long term basis to retain much of the deeply technical and specialized engineering resources typically engaged in providing software related services.

We have adopted several measures in response to COVID-19 adhering to local and regional restrictions, including instructing employees to work from home, adjusting our expenses and cash flow to correlate with potential declines in billings and cash collections from customers, shifting certain of our customer events to online-only webcasts and restricting non-critical business travel by our employees. Historically, a portion of field sales, professional services and other activities were conducted in person. Currently, because of travel restrictions related to COVID-19, substantially all of our sales, professional services and other activities are being conducted virtually. We have developed contingency plans to reduce costs further if the current situation changes. We continue to actively monitor business conditions and government mandates related to COVID-19 and may take further actions that alter our business operations as may be required by federal, state or local authorities or that we determine are in the best interests of our employees, customers, suppliers and shareholders.

Throughout this period, our response is focused on maintaining the health and safety of our employees, customers, and partners. We are committed to, and we believe we are capable of continuing to provide the same excellent level of service and technical support for our customers during these uncertain times. Our team is comfortable and highly experienced with remote collaboration, as it is a normal part of our global culture. During this crisis, customers working remotely can move their existing licenses from their on-premise servers to servers utilizing hosted Altair Units, or request temporary term-based software licenses for increased productivity and security. We are also providing access to an increased number of online training, marketing and sales resources.

We have converted our business to being capable of operating nearly 100% “virtual” as required or recommended under COVID-19 restrictions, leveraging our global technology infrastructure. While we are capable of sustained operations primarily in a virtual environment, we expect that we will gradually resume normalized operations, when permitted, based on local conditions and restrictions, with the primary focus of preserving employee welfare, while continuing to support customers. We have undertaken certain measures to manage operating expenses given the uncertainties with the COVID-19 environment. Previously, we introduced temporary wage reductions, or other measures, in accordance with local labor laws and regulations, to reduce near term compensation costs. These adjustments, which were beneficial during the period of heightened uncertainty early in COVID-19, have been rolled back, such that effective October 2020, the temporary wage reductions have been rescinded. We have, where possible, negotiated reductions in costs for consultants, professional and advisory fees, and other costs. Given global travel restrictions, we have substantially reduced expenses for travel related costs while many sales and marketing activities have reverted to being virtualized, further reducing certain expenditures on a net basis.

COVID-19 restrictions have begun to ease in certain jurisdictions, and we have been able to re-open offices in certain countries. However, certain jurisdictions that eased restrictions have subsequently heightened their restrictions. We have taken proactive steps to protect the health and safety of our employees, customers, and partners, preparing our offices for a safe return in compliance with

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local and regional regulations and requirements and enacting rigorous safety measures, including employee training and self-monitoring for symptoms of COVID-19. Adhering to local and regional requirements, these measures include a combination of the taking of all employee temperatures upon reporting to work, encouraging employees to continue to work from home, implementing social distancing protocols, maintaining suspension of travel, instituting facility protocols and cleaning guidelines, establishing hand sanitizer stations, disinfecting workspaces, and requiring the wearing of masks with respect to those employees who must be physically present in their workplace. In the event an employee contracts the virus or tests positive for COVID-19, we have mandated quarantining and have instructed employees not to return to work until such time that they have been cleared to do so. We expect to continue to practice these measures until we determine that COVID-19 is adequately contained for purposes of our business, and we may take further actions as government authorities require or recommend or as we determine to be in the best interests of our employees, customers, and partners.

We derive a significant portion of our revenue from international operations, which are primarily conducted in foreign currencies. The value of the U.S. dollar has fluctuated in comparison to certain foreign currencies, including in Europe, driven in part by COVID-19 events and news. Since we have substantial international operations that arise from our normal business operations, our financial results in 2021 may be impacted by COVID-19 driven variations in foreign currency exchange rates, apart from the traditional elements that underlie foreign currency exchange rate changes.

We have performed an assessment of certain tangible and intangible assets to determine whether events or changes in circumstances caused by the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in indicators of impairment as of December 31, 2020. Based on present expectations, we determined that it is not more likely than not that indicators of impairment existed as of December 31, 2020. Notwithstanding this conclusion, if business conditions were to deteriorate in a significant manner or for an extended duration within our customer base, the likelihood of impairment would increase, and we would again assess whether events or changes in circumstances indicate that an asset impairment that is more likely than not exists. Specifically, certain non-amortizing intangible assets from recent acquisitions valued on the basis of short-term forecasts of revenue will be re-assessed for indicators of impairment and it is possible that an impairment charge will be reflected in the future should COVID-19 business conditions worsen or extend substantially in duration.

As reflected in our period to period analysis below, we believe the emergence of COVID-19 has negatively affected our results of operations. COVID-19’s impact on some of our customers has primarily contributed to the decrease in revenue for software related and client engineering services. Our software product revenue has been affected by elongated sales cycles, greater challenges in securing renewals, as well as new and expansion business. While we continue to robustly engage with our customers, primarily virtually, to mitigate the uncertain extent of the negative impact of COVID-19 on our customers, our ability to attract, serve, retain, or expand customers will continue to be uncertain. Existing and potential customers may choose to reduce or delay technology spending in response to COVID-19, or attempt to renegotiate contracts and obtain concessions, which may materially and negatively impact our operating results, financial condition and prospects. In certain cases, we provided longer than normal payment terms to certain of our customers; however, the terms are less than one year, and we do not expect this to materially affect our consolidated financial statements. We are unable to accurately predict the full impact that COVID-19 will have due to numerous uncertainties, including the full scope of the disease, the duration of the outbreak, the number and intensity of subsequent waves of infections, actions that may be taken by governmental authorities, the impact to the businesses of our customers and partners, the development of treatments and vaccines, and other factors identified in Part I, Item 1A – Risk Factors included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Even after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides, we may experience material adverse impacts to our business as a result of any economic recession or depression that has occurred or may occur in the future. We will continue to evaluate the nature and extent of the impact to our business, consolidated results of operations, and financial condition.

Business combinations

In September 2020, we acquired all of the outstanding capital stock and equity interests of Univa Corporation (“Univa”) for a preliminary purchase price of $30.2 million, subject to certain adjustments. Univa is headquartered in Chicago, with offices in Canada and Germany. The financial results of Univa have been included in the Company’s consolidated financial statements since the acquisition date. Univa is a leading innovator in enterprise-grade workload management, scheduling, and optimization solutions for HPC and artificial intelligence (AI) on-premises and in the cloud. Univa’s technology complements Altair’s HPC and data analytics solutions and enables the Company to further expand into life sciences and financial services.

During the year ended December 31, 2020, the Company completed other business acquisitions that were individually insignificant to the Company’s consolidated financial statements. The aggregate purchase price of these other acquisitions was $16.9 million and was allocated to assets acquired and liabilities assumed at their estimated fair values.

We believe that our recent acquisitions result in certain benefits, including expanding our portfolio of software and products and enabling us to better serve our customer’s requests for data analytics and simulation technology. However, to realize some of these anticipated benefits, the acquired businesses must be successfully integrated. The success of these acquisitions will depend in part on our ability to realize these anticipated benefits. We may fail to realize the anticipated benefits of these acquisitions for a variety of reasons.

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Factors affecting our performance

We believe that our future success will depend on many factors, including those described below. While these areas present significant opportunity, they also present risks that we must manage to achieve successful results. If we are unable to address these challenges, our business, operating results and prospects could be harmed. See Part I, Item 1A. – Risk Factors included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Seasonality and quarterly results

Our billings have historically been highest in the first and fourth quarters of any calendar year and may vary in future quarters. The timing of recording billings and the corresponding effect on our cash flows may vary due to the seasonality of the purchasing patterns of our customers. In addition, the timing of the recognition of revenue, the amount and timing of operating expenses, including employee compensation, sales and marketing activities, and capital expenditures, may vary from quarter-to-quarter which may cause our reported results to fluctuate significantly. In addition, we may choose to grow our business for the long-term rather than to optimize for profitability or cash flows for a particular shorter-term period. This seasonality or the occurrence of any of the factors above may cause our results of operations to vary and our financial statements may not fully reflect the underlying performance of our business.

Foreign currency fluctuations

Because of our substantial international operations, we are exposed to foreign currency risks that arise from our normal business operations, as well as our transactions that are denominated in foreign currencies, including the Euro, British Pound Sterling, Indian Rupee, Japanese Yen, and Chinese Yuan. To present the changes in our underlying business without regard to the impact of currency fluctuations, we evaluate certain of our operating results both on an as reported basis, as well as on a constant currency basis.

Constant currency amounts exclude the effect of foreign currency fluctuations on our reported results. Our comparative financial results were impacted by fluctuations in the value of the United States dollar relative to other currencies during the year ended December 31, 2020, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. To present this information, the results for 2020 for entities whose functional currency is a currency other than the United States dollar were converted to United States dollars at rates that were in effect for 2019. These adjusted amounts are then compared to our current period reported amounts to provide operationally driven variances in our results.

The net effects of currency fluctuations on our Revenue, Net loss, Adjusted EBITDA and Billings are reflected in the table below. Amounts in brackets indicate a net adverse effect from currency fluctuations.

Business segments

We have identified two reportable segments: Software and Client Engineering Services:

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Our other businesses which do not meet the criteria to be separate reportable segments are combined and reported as “Other” which represents innovative services and products, including toggled, our LED lighting business. toggled is focused on developing and selling next-generation solid state lighting technology along with communication and control protocols based on our intellectual property for the direct replacement of fluorescent light tubes with LED lamps. Other businesses combined within Other include potential services and product concepts that are still in their development stages, and our WEYV business, which ceased operations in the third quarter of 2019.

For additional information about our reportable segments and other businesses, see Note 18 in the Notes to consolidated financial statements in Item 15, Part IV of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Components of results of operations

Revenue

We primarily derive revenue from the licensing of our software, which includes our units-based subscription licensing model and for term and perpetual software licenses, as well as software related services. Our CES business derives revenue from providing engineers and data scientists to support our customers’ long-term, ongoing projects.

Software

Software revenue is principally comprised of subscription licenses, and to a lesser extent, perpetual licenses and associated maintenance and support fees. Subscriptions are typically governed by contracts with annual terms which include product updates, maintenance and support. We generally recognize software license revenue up front, while maintenance and support revenue is generally recognized over the term of the contract. To a much lesser extent, Software also includes revenue from the sale of hardware products.

Software includes consulting, implementation services and training. Our software related services team is comprised of approximately 300 highly technical people globally. We focus on establishing a strong working relationship with the user community allowing us to offer guidance and expertise throughout their product creation process. We generally recognize revenue for software related services as those services are performed.

Software related services

Consulting services from product design and development projects are considered distinct performance obligations and are provided to customers on a time-and-materials, or T&M, or fixed-price basis. Altair recognizes services revenue from our T&M contracts using input-based estimates, utilizing direct labor and contractually agreed-upon hourly rates as the input measure. For fixed-price contracts, software services revenue is recognized over time using a method that measures the extent of progress towards completion of a performance obligation, generally using a cost-input method where revenue is recognized based on the proportion of total cost incurred to estimated total costs at completion. If output or input measures are not available or cannot be reasonably estimated, revenue is recognized upon completion of the services.

Client engineering services

We operate our CES business by hiring engineers and data scientists for placement at a customer site for specific customer-directed assignments. We employ and pay them only for the duration of the placement.

Our CES business generates revenue from placing simulation specialists, industrial designers, design engineers, materials experts, development engineers, manufacturing engineers, and information technology specialists. We recognize CES revenue based upon hours worked and contractually agreed-upon hourly rates.

Other

Our Other revenue consists primarily of revenue related to our LED lighting business operated out of our wholly-owned subsidiary, toggled. toggled designs, and sources through contract manufacturers, LED lighting and related products for sale to consumers and businesses. We also generate revenue through royalties from licensing toggled technology to third party manufacturers and resellers.

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Cost of revenue

Cost of software

Cost of software revenue consists of expenses related to software licensing, hardware sales and customer support. Significant expenses include employee compensation and related costs for support team members, including salaries, benefits, bonuses and stock-based compensation, as well as hardware costs, travel costs, certain data center and facility costs and royalties for third-party software products available to customers through our products or as part of our APA.

Cost of software related services

Cost of software related services revenue consists of personnel and related costs, such as salaries, benefits, bonuses and stock-based compensation, as well as travel expenses and certain data center and facility costs.

Cost of client engineering services

Cost of engineering services revenue consists primarily of employee compensation and related costs. We employ and pay them only for the duration of the placement at a customer site.

Cost of other

Cost of other revenue includes the cost of LED lighting products and freight related to products sold to retail and commercial sales channels.

Operating expenses

Operating expenses, as defined and discussed below, support all the products and services that we provide to our customers and, as a result, they are presented in an aggregate total.

Research and development

Research and development expenses consist primarily of employee compensation and related costs associated with our development team, including salaries, benefits, bonuses, professional consulting and development fees, and stock-based compensation expense. Our research and development efforts are focused on enhancing the functionality, breadth and scalability of our software, addressing new use cases, and developing additional innovative technologies. Timely development of new products is essential to maintaining our competitive position, and we release new versions of our software on a regular basis. All software development costs are expensed as incurred as our current software development process is essentially completed concurrent with the establishment of technological feasibility.

Sales and marketing

Sales and marketing expenses consist primarily of employee compensation and related costs associated with our sales and marketing staff, including salaries, benefits, bonuses, commissions and stock-based compensation, as well as costs relating to our marketing and business development programs including trade shows and events. We intend to continue to invest resources in our sales and marketing initiatives to drive growth and extend our market position.

General and administrative

General and administrative expenses consist of employee compensation and related costs for executive, finance, legal, human resources, recruiting, and employee-related information technology and administrative personnel, including salaries, benefits, bonuses and stock-based compensation expense, professional fees for external legal and accounting services, depreciation, facilities, recruiting and other consulting services.

Amortization of intangible assets

Amortization of intangible assets consists primarily of amortization of intangibles associated with acquisitions. We expect to incur additional amortization expenses resulting from future strategic acquisitions.

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Other operating income

Other operating income consists primarily of government subsidies, primarily in France, in the form of grant income associated with certain of our research and development activities and other items as disclosed.

Interest expense

Interest expense consists of interest expense on our outstanding indebtedness and amortization of debt issuance costs.

Other (income) expense, net

Other (income) expense, net is comprised primarily of foreign currency exchange gains and losses generated from the settlement and remeasurement of transactions denominated in currencies other than the functional currency of our operating units and interest income on invested cash.

Income tax expense

Income tax expense is comprised primarily of income taxes related to United States, foreign, and state jurisdictions in which we conduct business. Income tax expense also includes taxes withheld outside of the United States attributable to remittances to the Company from certain foreign subsidiaries. We record interest and penalties related to income tax matters as income tax expense. We expect the amount of income tax expense (benefit), if any, to vary each reporting period depending upon fluctuations in our quantum and tax jurisdictional mix of income (loss). We have substantial United States net operating loss carryforwards with no expiration period for losses generated 2018 onwards, and tax credit carryforwards which began to expire in 2018. The ability to utilize these tax attributes is highly dependent upon our ability to generate taxable income in the United States in the future.

Our future effective annual tax rate may be materially impacted by the amount of benefits and charges from tax amounts associated with our foreign earnings that are taxed at rates different from the federal statutory rate, the taxation of the foreign earnings in the U.S. under the Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income, or GILTI, regime, changes in valuation allowances, level of profit before tax, accounting for uncertain tax positions, stock-based compensation, business combinations, payments to the Company from certain foreign subsidiaries, closure of statute of limitations, settlements of tax audits, and changes in tax laws including United States tax law changes that were enacted in December 2017. A significant amount of our earnings is generated in our EMEA and APAC regions. Our future effective tax rates may be adversely affected to the extent earnings are lower than anticipated in countries where we have lower statutory tax rates.

As of December 31, 2020 and 2019, we had gross deferred tax assets, or DTAs, of $133.4 million and $117.5 million, respectively, primarily related to net operating loss carryforwards, tax credits, share-based compensation, lease obligations and employee benefits. We are entitled to a United States federal tax deduction when non-qualified stock options, or NSOs, are exercised. In connection with our IPO, a significant number of our NSOs were exercised, resulting in a tax deduction for United States income tax purposes. This deduction, in conjunction with other expected deferred tax asset reversals, resulted in the establishment of a valuation allowance for $47.0 million in 2017 for the United States DTAs. Our ability to utilize any net operating losses or tax credits may be limited under provisions of the Code if we undergo an ownership change after our IPO (generally defined as a greater than 50-percentage point cumulative change (by value) in the equity ownership of certain stockholders over a rolling three-year period). We also inherited net operating losses, or NOLs, from the acquisition of Datawatch and Univa, which are subject to specific limitations on usage. We may also be unable to realize our tax credit carryforwards which began to expire in 2018.

Based on the evidence available, including a lack of taxable earnings in the United States, we recorded a valuation allowance against substantially all of our net deferred tax assets in the United States. If a change in judgment regarding this valuation allowance were to occur in the future, we will record a potentially material deferred tax benefit, which could result in a favorable impact on our effective tax rate in that period. The utilization of tax attributes to offset taxable income reduces the amount of deferred tax assets subject to a valuation allowance.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or the Tax Act, was enacted on December 22, 2017. The Tax Act reduced the U.S. federal corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21%, required companies to pay a one-time transition tax on earnings of certain foreign subsidiaries that were previously tax deferred and created new taxes on certain foreign sourced earnings. Previously, we applied the guidance in Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 118, Income Tax Accounting Implications of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act when accounting for the enactment-date effects of the Tax Act. As of December 31, 2018, we completed our accounting for the tax effects of the Tax Act; we have not recorded any adjustments to the provisional amounts recorded at December 31, 2017 related to the remeasurement of our deferred balances. At December 31, 2017, we originally recorded a provisional amount for its one-time transition tax of $4.2 million, which was substantially offset by available foreign tax credits. During the year ended December 31, 2018, we revised our estimate of the provisional amount of the one-time transition tax. Upon further analyses of certain aspects of the Tax Act and refinement of its

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calculations, we increased our provisional amount of transition tax by approximately $0.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2018. This resulted in no change to income tax expense due to the impact of foreign tax credits.

The Tax Act subjects a U.S. shareholder to current tax on Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income, or GILTI, earned by certain foreign subsidiaries. The impact of GILTI resulted in no incremental tax expense for the year ended December 31, 2020 due to a full valuation allowance on U.S. net deferred tax assets. We have made an accounting policy election to treat taxes due under the GILTI provision as a current period expense. In addition, the recently enacted CARES Act and the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (CAA) provide relief to U.S. federal corporate taxpayers through temporary adjustments to net operating loss rules, changes to limitations on interest expense deductibility, and the acceleration of available refunds for minimum tax credit carryforwards. The CARES Act and the CAA did not have a material effect on the Company’s consolidated financial statements.

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Results of operations

The following table sets forth our results of operations and certain financial data for the years ended December 31, 2020 and 2019:

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The following table sets forth our revenue growth on a constant currency basis for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019:

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Years ended December 31, 2020 and 2019

Revenue

Total revenue increased by $11.0 million, or 2%, for the year ended December 31, 2020, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. The increase was primarily attributable to an increase in software revenue, partially offset by a decrease in software related services revenue and CES revenue as a result of the slowdown in economic activity by our customers primarily due to COVID-19.

Software

The 7% increase in our software revenue for the year ended December 31, 2020, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2019, was primarily resulted from expansion with existing customers and an increase in software subscription arrangements.

Software related services

Software related services revenue decreased 23% for the year ended December 31, 2020, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. This decrease was largely the result of customers reducing their demand for these services primarily due to the impact of COVID-19 on their business operations.

Client engineering services

Our CES business is primarily affected by customer demand and our ability to fill customers’ open positions. As noted above in

response to COVID-19, in April some of our CES customers furloughed staff positions, while some other customers reduced

CES staff working hours, reduced billing rates or eliminated certain positions. We have acted in concert with those customers to furlough or curtail the hours and compensation of those impacted employees until such time as our customers return to normal

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staffing, billing rates, or required working hours. The 10% decrease in CES revenue for the year ended December 31, 2020, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2019, reflects those steps, offset in part by our ability to fulfill demand for our client engineering services in the first quarter of 2020.

Other

The 14% decrease in other revenue for the year ended December 31, 2020, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2019, was primarily due to lower revenue from decreased unit sales at lower selling prices from toggled, our LED lighting business, and decreased royalty income of $0.5 million. The decrease in unit sales was driven by COVID-19.

Cost of revenue

Software

Cost of software revenue decreased by $1.4 million, or 2%, for the year ended December 31, 2020, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. This decrease was primarily attributable to a $2.3 million decrease in travel expense and a $1.3 million decrease in hardware costs related to software revenue, partially offset by a $1.4 million increase in employee compensation and related costs and $1.4 million increase in stock-based compensation expense.

Software related services

Cost of software related services revenue decreased 17%, for the year ended December 31, 2020, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. The decrease in the current year period was primarily due to a $3.7 million decrease in employee compensation and related costs due to a decline in consulting services and a $0.5 million decrease in travel expenses as a result of COVID-19 restrictions.

Client engineering services

Cost of CES revenue decreased 11%, for the year ended December 31, 2020, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2019, consistent with the change in CES revenue. In response to reduced customer demand for these services, we furloughed or curtailed the hours and compensation of employees until such time as our customers return to normalized staffing or required working hours.

Other

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The cost of other revenue decreased 18%, for the year ended December 31, 2020, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. This decrease is due to cost reductions for products sold and lower sales volumes for our LED lighting business.

Gross profit

Gross profit increased by $22.3 million, or 7%, for the year ended December 31, 2020, as compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. This increase in gross profit was primarily attributable to the growth of software revenue and reduction in cost of revenue as described above.

Operating expenses

Operating expenses, as discussed below, support all the products and services that we provide to our customers and, as a result, they are reported and discussed here in the aggregate.

Research and development