Aras Announces Significant Growth Investment by GI Partners

SAN FRANCISCO, CA and ANDOVER, MA, April 19, 2021 – Aras, the only resilient platform provider for digital industrial applications, today announced a substantial growth investment from GI Partners, a leading private investment firm. This investment will further accelerate Aras’ low-code platform innovation, global expansion, and customer success.

Aras continues to disrupt the industrial software market with its low-code platform and suite of digital solutions spanning the product lifecycle from global product development and systems engineering to manufacturing, maintenance, and digital twins. Large enterprises such as Microsoft, Honda, and Airbus use Aras to rapidly digitalize mission critical processes and replace legacy systems faster.

“We believe the pace of digital transformation in manufacturing is just beginning to increase, and that Aras is uniquely positioned to deliver the next generation of platform-based applications for global companies. We are excited to partner with Peter and the management team to help further extend their cloud technology leadership, world-class support, and operations as the business scales,” said Travis Pearson, Managing Director and Co-Head of Private Equity at GI Partners. “Our vision is to grow the company through investment in internal processes and innovation, both organic R&D and acquisitions.”

“As hardware and software processes merge across the lifecycle, an industrial low-code platform with open interoperability is critical to layer over, rationalize, and replace legacy systems faster, creating a single, end-to-end digital thread foundation to enable artificial intelligence & machine learning analysis and optimization,” said Peter Schroer, Founder & CEO of Aras. “We are transforming the way the world makes products by reinventing software for engineering and manufacturing to empower our customers with the flexibility to adapt quickly to tomorrow’s most strategic challenges.”

“The Aras team has developed a truly differentiated low-code platform powerful enough for the most complex scenarios in industry. We see significant opportunity for large companies to fast-track their enterprise SaaS migration with Aras and achieve step-function results,” added Sendil Rajendran, Director at GI Partners.

“Aras has established itself with a market-leading solution and has achieved significant growth throughout the duration of our investment at Silver Lake Kraftwerk,” said Karen King, Managing Director at Silver Lake. “It has been exciting to help launch a true innovator like Aras as the company continues to show strong momentum toward category leadership in this next phase of its expansion.”

Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC served as exclusive financial advisor to Aras and Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP served as outside counsel. Evercore served as exclusive financial advisor and Ropes & Gray LLP served as legal advisor to GI Partners.

About Aras
Aras provides a resilient platform for digital industrial applications. Its open, low code technology enables the rapid delivery of flexible, upgradeable solutions for the engineering, manufacturing and maintenance of complex products. Aras’ platform and product lifecycle management applications connect users in all disciplines and functions to critical product data and processes across the lifecycle and throughout the extended supply chain. Airbus, Audi, DENSO, GE, Honda, Kawasaki, Microsoft, Mitsubishi, and Nissan are investing in the platform to manage complex change and traceability. For more information, please visit http://www.aras.com.

About GI Partners
Founded in 2001, GI Partners is a private investment firm based in San Francisco, California. The firm has raised over $26 billion in capital from leading institutional investors around the world to invest in private equity, real estate, and data infrastructure strategies. The private equity team invests primarily in companies in the Healthcare, IT Infrastructure, Services, and Software sectors. The real estate team invests across a broad range of platforms and strategies. The data infrastructure team invests primarily in hard asset infrastructure businesses underpinning the digital economy. For more information, please visit www.gipartners.com.

About Silver Lake Kraftwerk
Silver Lake Kraftwerk is part of Silver Lake, the global leader in technology investing with more than $79 billion in combined assets under management and committed capital and a team of professionals based in North America, Europe and Asia. Silver Lake Kraftwerk has a portfolio of technology and technology-enabled growth businesses that seek to drive efficiency across the operations, energy, and resources industries. For more information about Silver Lake Kraftwerk and Silver Lake, please visit www.silverlake.com.