The French champion of industrial software signs the second largest acquisition in its history to accelerate its AI strategy in life sciences.
Dassault Systèmes announced the purchase of the American ArisGlobal for nearly $2 billion, marking the second largest acquisition in its history. This strategic operation aims to strengthen the French group’s position in artificial intelligence applied to health, a sector at the heart of its growth strategy.
A major operation for Dassault Systèmes
Dassault Systèmes is spending $1.8 billion in cash, to which up to $200 million will be added depending on financial performance. This is the second largest acquisition in the history of Dassault Systèmes, after that of Medidata in 2019 for $5.8 billion. This operation is a continuation of the shift in life sciences taken by the publisher in 2019.
This is the first major acquisition under the era of Pascal Daloz, its general director, who took the reins in 2024. “Today marks a major step in our ambition to transform life sciences by connecting molecules, patients and results in the real world,” said Pascal Daloz in a press release.
ArisGlobal, an American publisher specializing in software for the life sciences industries, offers a platform to automate and secure certain operations for drug development, evaluation and understanding of adverse effects, as well as complex regulatory compliance procedures. According to Dassault Systèmes, ArisGlobal software is used by half of the 50 largest players in the global pharmaceutical industry.
ArisGlobal software processes more than 12 million patient safety reports each year, and 80% of this data is not public. This well of real-life data will be valuable to Dassault Systèmes for training its artificial intelligence models, intended to faithfully simulate real-world physical interactions, accelerate clinical trials or new drug discovery, and provide a unified AI-powered data platform to overcome current industry fragmentation.
Life sciences activities currently represent 19% of Dassault Systèmes’ turnover. ArisGlobal is expected to bring it $175 million in additional annual revenue. Since the start of the year, the company’s life sciences branch has weighed on its performance, declining over both quarters.
Dassault Systèmes’ shares have fallen by almost 26% since the start of the year and by almost 40% over one year, bringing its capitalization to around 25 billion euros. Last fall, it had to lower its turnover forecasts for 2025, due to the difficulties of the European automobile sector and, more broadly, of industry.
For its second quarter, the group presented a turnover of 1.56 billion euros, up 4%, after a more difficult first quarter. In the first half, net profit jumped 28%, to 611.8 million euros, thanks to strong cost reductions. The group maintains its forecasts for the whole of 2026, with revenue growth of between 1% and 3%.
“Transforming an industry cannot be done in a quarter, 2026 will be the pivotal year,” Pascal Daloz promised financial analysts during a conference call.
