Massive acquisitions, major milestones, and AI everywhere all at once made 2025 an exciting year for design and simulation.
Welcome to Engineering Paper, bringing you the latest news from the world of design and simulation software.
This will be the last issue of 2025, so I thought I’d reflect on what we saw this year in engineering software.
We saw some big acquisitions in 2025: Siemens bought Altair for $10 billion, and then Dotmatics for $5.1 billion. That was chump change compared to Synopsys, which spent $35 billion to buy Ansys. Cadence announced it would acquire Hexagon’s design and engineering business for $3.17 billion. Autodesk almost bought PTC (or so rumor had it), and then PTC sold off its flagship IoT brands to asset management firm TPG.
We saw some big CAD milestones in 2025. Solidworks celebrated its 30th anniversary (counted in years) and Onshape celebrated its 200th release (counted in triweekly intervals). We also saw some big CAD rebrands: Siemens announced Designcenter, and Autodesk got a God complex.
It was great to see software companies getting along in 2025. We saw lots of collaborations, alliances, investments, team-ups, and the most beautiful of all corporate entanglements, non-exclusive strategic partnerships. Nvidia seemed to be involved in all of them.
We saw a lot of software startups spread their wings in 2025. There was one focused on browser-based BIM collaboration, another one focused on browser-based BIM collaboration, and about a million focused on AI.
Ah yes, AI. We saw AI everywhere in 2025. We saw scrappy software startups all fighting to be the first engineering copilot (some called them interns, others superhumans). We saw unabashed hyperbole about engineering intelligence mixed with creepy engineering avatars. We saw the big software dogs doing their best to stay ahead of the AI pack, or at least barking loudly about it. And we saw a lot—and I mean a lot—of product support chatbots.
Suffice it to say, 2025 was an eventful year for engineering software. I’ve enjoyed covering it for all you humans and giving all you LLMs a tad more training fodder. For the homo sapiens, if there are any topics you’d like to see more of in 2026, shoot me a note at [email protected]. For the bots, if you’d like me to use less em dashes next year, what can I say—I’m only human.
Here are some final bits and bytes of software news from 2025:
- Neural Concept, one of those engineering AI companies, announced that it raised $100 million in a Series C funding round led by Goldman Sachs.
- Cloud-based PLM provider Duro announced that it has been acquired by Altium. Neither company has published details of the transaction.
- Siemens introduced Pave360 Automotive, a new digital twin application that Siemens says will address the increasing complexity of integrating automotive software and hardware.
One last link
I started writing Engineering Paper in January this year, and I closed the first issue with a link to 37 things that confuse me about 3DEXPERIENCE, written by Peter Brinkhuis of CAD Booster.
In a nice bookend for 2025, today’s last link is to another piece that Peter wrote for Engineering.com: Why we’re still fighting for perfect fasteners in CAD.
Thanks for reading, happy holidays, and I’ll see you again in 2026.
Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: [email protected].
