The company was 200 million in debt. How on earth does a medium-sized music software company get 200 million in debt? That's just staggeringly bad management. NI was a big name in the field with guaranteed income of about 20 million a year. How could they screw that up? Don't blame the vultures asset strippers and capitalism - if NI has been properly managed then they would not have been called in. This is all down to crappy management.

 

Native Instruments Lays Off 100 Employees in Berlin – September 10, 2019

According to "RBB 24," Native Instruments is laying off 100 employees at its Berlin location. Essentially, one in five employees must now look for a new job. The cuts primarily affect the sales, marketing, product management, administration, and development departments.

Although revenue grew in 2018 and the first half of 2019, costs also rose sharply. NI now plans to consolidate its various divisions and present them on a new platform in 2020.

www.amazona.de/community/native-instruments-entlaesst-100-mitarbeiter-in-berlin/

 

Last edited: Jul 19, 2026 at 1:13 PM

Here is an AI generated summing up, with the FIRST private equity bullsh*t all ppl forgot ... some on purpose.
And most forgot iZotope, Plugin Alliance, and Brainworx (Soundwide) too.

All this sh*t is due to corporate debt architecture, due to the FIRST private equity that killed NI.
Native Instrument is NOT a "single company" since 2021.

Spoiler

Corporate and Financial Summary: Native Instruments

1. The Roots of the Economic Strain (2021–2025)
In April 2021, the private equity firm Francisco Partners acquired a 76% controlling stake in Native Instruments. Under their direction, NI embarked on an ambitious consolidation strategy:

• The "Soundwide" Era: NI merged corporate ecosystems with iZotope, Plugin Alliance, and Brainworx under an umbrella parent company called Soundwide.
  
  
• The Debt Burden: This aggressive roll-up strategy accumulated massive debt (reportedly over £250 million against roughly $25 million in EBITDA by late 2023).
  
  
• Market Cooling: While sales surged during the pandemic lockdown boom, the pro-audio market cooled significantly between 2023 and 2025. The company struggled to service its debt under rising global interest rates, leading to multiple rounds of internal layoffs and leadership changes.

2. The 2026 Insolvency Restructuring
In January 2026, Native Instruments GmbH officially filed for preliminary insolvency proceedings in Berlin.

• Not a Product Failure: Industry analysts and NI's management emphasized that the insolvency was entirely due to corporate debt architecture, not the health of its core products (like Kontakt, Komplete, or Traktor) or lack of revenue (which sat around $94 million annually).
  
  
• Operational Protection: The legal filing served as a mechanism to protect the company from creditors while administrators aggressively pursued a Merger & Acquisition (M&A) process to offload the assets to a financially stable owner.

3. The Resolution: Acquisition by inMusic (May 2026)
The corporate uncertainty concluded on May 8, 2026, when inMusic Brands officially acquired Native Instruments.

Detail Description

The Buyer inMusic Brands (Parent company of Akai Professional, Alesis, Denon DJ, M-Audio, and AIR Music Technology).
Strategic Fit Highly complementary. inMusic specializes in hardware ecosystems (MPC, keyboards, DJ decks) that integrate perfectly with NI's industry-standard software (Kontakt, Traktor).
Operational Impact The acquisition separates NI's product teams from the toxic debt load of the previous private equity structure, ensuring long-term continuity for product updates, servers, and ecosystem stability.
Summary Takeaway: Native Instruments' recent history is a textbook example of software companies being over-leveraged by private equity. However, by joining the inMusic stable alongside brands like Akai, NI has successfully transitioned into a massive, hardware-integrated audio hardware and software conglomerate.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jul 19, 2026 at 9:56 PM

Closer to/in excess of half a billion Euros in 2025 I believe.

(=> EMH Partners)
2020: +4€ mln

(=> Midco II GmbH)
2021: -87€ mln
2022: -110€ mln (-196€ mln cumulative)
2023: -140€ mln (-337€ mln cumulative)
2024: -149€ mln (-486€ mln cumulative, about -556$ mln)

 

Whooot?? Private equity doing it's pump and dump?
Well who would have thought inMusic would do what they all do?
Because the name is sooo cool and sooo in touch with artists?
//edit//
This is where they inflate the value by drastically reducing the workforce / cost.
Usually this is done prior to sell it.
Some illiterate bloke is gonna buy it because the books look awesome.
In about 1 to 2 years the company is dead (for good this time).
inMusic never wanted to bring them back to live.

 

Last edited: Jul 19, 2026 at 9:00 PM

This can also sound very self-serving when a good portion of the reason why their company went so far in the red ink is due to being one of the companies with the most freely shared but most used content ever in the audio software world. Without going into insolvency, some corporate vulture like InMusic would never have had the chance to buy the company for cents on the dollar.

 

When you ask $500/year for all old stuff plugins and sounds from 2005, you deserve it. Also, Komplete Collector 1700 euro packages? Really? Nilla please

 

Yep. They probably wouldn't have ended up with that much debt if they'd played the game in a more predatory way, but they didn't. Even so, choosing not to do that just led to another group of investors taking over the company, almost certainly to do exactly what they refused to do.

In the end, capitalism is about doing the bad things, even if you refuse to do it now, youre just delaying the inevitable

 

You could be right, but I don't think it's that easy.

Native Instruments always got something hot comming off, every year I see at least 2 major releases from them (and I'm being VERY conservative), doing that prolly cost a lot and led to the debt which led to the sad acquisition, I bet they didn't "had to" spend that much, but would they've been able to pour all that content and value in the market in the same way? is it about making profits or making art?

May sound too simple but I don't think the debt is really the point here

 

It's such a mix of failures it is impossible to point at any one thing, unless someone wants a simplistic answer like "bad management", "socialism vs. capitalism", and any other over simplification. Something about shared content such as theirs has a multiplier effect to it though. A lot of people who would normally purchase something won't, just because it is already shared, not because they will end up using a shared copy themselves. When you have a sea of libraries whose only real selling point is they have some "unique" aspect to them, which no longer exists when thousands of people are also using that not-so-unique-anymore instrument for free, people will take a pass on it. When every new release is greeted with "just wait a week and it will show up", potential buyers will do exactly that.

When the sales, and therefore profits, shrink per release is a pretty common source of a mistake driven by the fallacy of voume and flawed economy of scale thinking (management problem). If a company keeps pumping out products where they are making less and less money on each one, they react by creating even more of them. Every new one adds additional overhead for new product development, wether the product is an actual success or it isn't. Commonly said as something like "We lose a dollar on every unit, but we'll make it up in volume." Usually as sarcasm.

 

In fairness, having twice been on the startup side of this conversation, most founders aim to go public to keep growing the company - not just cash out - the unfortunate byproduct of which being that said founders often end up getting pushed out of their company. Fact is though, no one's put a gun to their head to force them to sell their company: they chose to do so - we can't blame "Capitalism" for that.

Everything digital is deprecable - not only software but also hardware (officially at least), that's our global, common reality now, and has been since the early 90s at least (mid 80s for musicians, realistically). Most of us didn't mind because along the way, specs got better: every new iteration was audibly better than the last, so we just bobbed along.

Now that hardware innovation has levelled off (for the most part), we are essentially stuck in a software world, or ecosystem. And the thing about ecosystems: they're sticky. It's hard, painful even (cost, time, effort) to start afresh, anew, tabula rasa. Fortunately, we have options: never mind Mac or PC/iOS or Android - those are just glorified GUIs for their master ecosystems - we have a multitude of DAWs and plugin makers to choose from. We have options.

Software "Piracy" was originally a reaction by folks in developing countries (Asia, Africa, South America, but also eastern Europe and Russia) where a Microsoft Office license was about a monthly or bi-monthly salary. I could tell you stories, but in the spirit of brevity...

True that... I hear a lot of folks wishing they could ditch Pro Tools - for Luna, Nuendo, Sequoia, Reaper, whatever - but they can't without inflicting self injury - a "financial decision that directly affects their own lives," as you said.

 

Yeah, I oversimplified saying just "capitalism", but at the same time I don't think it's worth the entire explanation cuz I feel like it gets back to the "yeah just capitalism", crazy.

The issue isn't that every company or every investor behaves this way. It's that the system consistently rewards short-term financial performance above everything else. Companies are under constant pressure to reduce costs, increase margins and satisfy shareholders, even when those decisions directly undermine the thing that made the company valuable in the first place.

That's why you see companies built around creativity laying off hundreds of artists, developers or sound designers while arguing that AI can replace them. Even if AI can reduce costs in the short term, replacing the people responsible for the creative identity of the company risks destroying the very reason customers cared about it.

To me, that's the clearest sign that the people deciding the company's future are no longer the founders with a long-term vision, but investors whose primary goal is maximizing financial returns. Whether the company becomes creatively weaker, damages the industry or loses its identity is often irrelevant if financial metrics improve. (I could say its secondary but being brutally honest I don't really believe it)

It's like winning a championship with an incredibly engineered race car, then selling every part that made it capable of winning because those parts have value on the balance sheet. The car is still being invited to championships because of its reputation, but now it's just another generic car living off what it used to be.

That's why I see this as a systemic problem rather than an isolated management failure. Different companies, different industries, same incentives, and the same pattern keeps repeating.

Spotify for me is the saddest example of this, in all aspects... And in the end I just think: yeah, just capitalism being capitalism

 

The problem isn't necessarily that I need FL Studio's tools or Waves plugins specifically. It's that collaboration itself pushes you toward the industry's ecosystem.

I can't imagine producing music while only exchanging stems with everyone instead of sharing project files. I can't imagine not using Kontakt libraries, Waves plugins, or even things like the Zay 808s, because those have become part of the culture. At some point, they're no longer just tools, they're part of the language people use to make music together.

It's similar to why millions of people still use Adobe products despite constantly complaining about the company's policies. They aren't necessarily there because it's the best software. They're there because that's what the market expects and what everyone around them uses.

I actually think it's even more pronounced in music production, especially in hip-hop and trap, where I come from. Even if I wanted to think outside the box and build a completely different workflow, I still have to collaborate with people who are inside that box. That kind of defeats the whole point, because no matter how independent your workflow is, you still need to speak the same language as everyone else.

 

inMusic is the new Magix. It was a corpse collector as well, squeezing the last drops of blood out of an already dead company.

In case of NI I think:
I don't know if I feel all that sorry for NI's employees. They were part of a company that hasn't made any significant improvements to its software in many years but has just wanted to rake in the cash.
I don't understand how that fits with the self-image of a dedicated programmer

In most cases, it goes like this in my experience: the really good people quickly realize when things are heading toward coasting and leave the company while it still seems to be doing well.
In the end, what’s left is a dregs of people who are too cowardly to pull the ripcord for themselves, or too incompetent to land a job elsewhere.

 

Last edited: Jul 21, 2026 at 6:37 PM

Some of the decision-makers or signatories at Native Instruments made a massive miscalculation; they either received poor advice or misjudged the market. Then, when sales failed to materialize, they failed completely from a business management perspective.

In short, NI today survives not on its innovations and inventions, but by living off its core assets. Money is still being made with NI for now, but if the company stops turning a profit, it will vanish from the map!

 

NI didn't wanted to "spend" that money.
It is private equity firm Francisco Partners who pushed it.
They done it because they smelled fresh meat during flue19.
It is in my previous post "spoiler" (thanks admin ;D)

As long as that private equity pushed NI, it was NOT an NI decision anymore.
It is a private equity firm that created the zombie.
And now InMusic, a corporate pile of s... who is going to dispatch the zombie pieces.
Pushing (again) NI to do stupid moves.

It is not that complicated to understand.
NI was already dead in 2021, thanks to private equity Francisco Partners who smelled fresh meat during flue19.

 

Programmers don't get to make decisions though, they just implement what management dictates - and management is just staffed by old and confused people with little hands-on experience, understanding of what the market wants, the state of their products, or what your programmers can realistically implement.

"Kids like games. We need to take cues from games. Kids like preset packs and loot boxes. We need loot boxes for preset packs in Kontakt. Yeah. Can we add Roblox to Kontakt?"

 

What does it all matter really? An 8tb SSD now costs more than most consumer PCs at this point. Not only will there be no new code rewrite for Kontakt, but nobody will even be able to afford a place to store their libraries.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/prod...ZbDem6qTKt18xaV1C3DZSJSjBs8dxoacaAp_2EALw_wcB

 

You don't need a big SSD if you use my streaming online service. Just $8.99 a month.. for now