Native Instruments, iZotope, And Plugin Alliance All Have New Homes

You’ve seen and heard me rail against the evils of private equity over the years, but I’ve been especially focused on Francisco Partners acquisition of Native Instruments. After that happened in 2019, Native then acquired iZotope and Plugin Alliance during Covid when everyone was at home buying and creating to fill up the time. Predictably, as soon as everyone went back to work, sales fell, and Native Instruments eventually wound up in insolvency this year. Luckily all three companies have landed on their feet again with new homes that really care about the music and audio industries, rather than some faceless PE firm just trying to extract every last dime from a struggling company. Let’s take a look at each.

iZotope

First off, iZotope was recently acquired by Boris FX, the Academy and Emmy Award-winning team behind Sapphire, Continuum, and Mocha Pro, high-end video postproduction tools. The company also owns Sequoia, Samplitude, and CrumplePop audio tools, so iZotope is just a natural extension.

This seems like a great fit as the company is already familiar with the audio industry, and has a strong pedigree of building high-quality plugins. It’s video clients are equivalent to iZotope’s audio clients in that they’re professionals needing specific tools for specific jobs so they’re very familiar with that market.

Plugin Alliance

Dirk Ulrich, Plugin Alliance and Brainworx founder, yesterday announced that he has re-acquired the company he created in 2012. This was indeed a surprising but welcome move, as who better knows the brand and its customers better.

While Dirk was away from Plugin Alliance he formed Rockforce.ai and acquired Manley Labs, then Apogee, two leaders in audio hardware.

Of all the possible acquisition scenarios, this was probably the least likely, but the best. I’m sure Brainworx and Plugin Alliance users are very happy with the news.

Native Instruments

Of the three, the Native Instruments acquisition is the one that bears the most watching. The company was bought out of insolvency by inMusic, a holding company for brands like Moog Music, Akai, Alesis, Numark, Rane, and several other audio brands.

The problem I have with this is that all of its brands have suffered after their purchase, in that their visibility and product development have dropped considerably. In fact, some of the companies are now near invisibile.

To top it off, there’s a well-founded rumor today that inMusic has laid off about 100 people from nearly all of NI’s departments. inMusic said to be consolidating everything under one roof, which seems understandable from a business perspective, but not so much if you’re a customer.

No doubt NI users are wondering today whether they’ll see updates on existing products, will have qualified customer service reps to speak with, or if the company will dwindle to a mere shell of itself as so many others have.

The good part of these new homes for iZotope, Plugin Alliance, and Native Instruments is that each company appears to be better off than when they were under Francisco Partner’s thumb. iZotope and Plugin Alliance look to be in great shape, but only time will tell whether the move is a net positive for Native Instruments.

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