Three months after filing for preliminary insolvency in Germany, Native Instruments has a new owner. On May 7, 2026, CEO Nick Williams announced that inMusic has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Native Instruments — and with it, iZotope, Plugin Alliance, and Brainworx.
The response across the production community landed somewhere between relief and “wait and see.” Relief because the real alternative — fragmented ownership, abandoned platforms, licence limbo for 25 million registered users — had been a live possibility since January. Scepticism because press release optimism is cheap, and the real test comes when the lawyers leave the room.
How We Got Here
Francisco Partners, a US-based private equity firm, took a majority stake in Native Instruments in 2021. The capital funded an aggressive acquisition run: iZotope, Plugin Alliance, and Brainworx were folded in, the combined entity was briefly rebranded “Soundwide,” then that name was quietly dropped. The product strategy never fully cohered, the debt load grew, and by January 2026 NI filed for preliminary insolvency — something we broke down in full in Native Instruments Insolvency: What Does It Mean and What Happens Now.
CEO Nick Williams — who joined in 2022 during the Francisco Partners era — spent the following months managing the insolvency process publicly while running a private M&A process in parallel. In March he confirmed “multiple parties with deep roots in audio and technology” were in discussions. InMusic turned out to be the winning bidder.
What InMusic Actually Is
InMusic is not a newcomer, but it has lived almost entirely on the hardware side of the industry. Founded in 1992 and headquartered in Cumberland, Rhode Island, the group owns Akai Professional, Denon DJ, Numark, Rane, M-Audio, Alesis, and since 2023, Moog Music. That Moog acquisition was met with industry-wide anxiety at the time. Two years on, new hardware has shipped and Moog’s engineering identity has remained intact — the closest thing to a precedent inMusic can point to here.
Adding Native Instruments to the group changes its centre of gravity entirely. InMusic has built its business on physical products. It is now inheriting one of the largest software ecosystems in music production: Kontakt, which underpins more third-party instrument libraries than any competing platform; Traktor and its loyal DJ user base; Maschine; the entire Komplete bundle — which just reached its 2026 edition, as we covered in our Komplete 26 feature; plus iZotope’s RX and Ozone, and the Plugin Alliance and Brainworx processing catalogues. None of this resembles what inMusic has scaled before. That is both the opportunity and the open question.
The Partnership That Came First
The acquisition did not emerge from cold outreach. In early 2025, inMusic and Native Instruments announced a formal collaboration: NKS integration arrived on Akai’s MPK controller range and M-Audio’s Oxygen series, and Native Instruments content became available on the MPC standalone platform for the first time. In hindsight, it looks like due diligence with a handshake already in progress.
inMusic CEO Jack O’Donnell was direct in the official statement:
“Our work together has already shown how strong this combination can be. Bringing these platforms together allows us to move faster, deepen integration, and build better tools for creators.”
Williams’ statement was notably personal, acknowledging the difficulty of the past three months and explicitly thanking the users who “kept showing up” through the insolvency period.
What It Means in Practice
For users: all products, activations, and support continue normally throughout the transition. The deal is expected to close in the coming weeks. For Kontakt library developers and NKS hardware partners whose businesses depend on NI’s platform stability, the short-term headline is continuity — which, after four months of uncertainty, is not nothing.
The longer-term questions are more interesting. Will inMusic invest in Kontakt’s development pipeline at the rate the community expects? Does the MPC–NI hardware integration deepen into something genuinely useful, or stay at the level of a feature bullet point? Does the DJ community — vocal about Traktor’s development pace for years — see any change in momentum?
One Roof, Many Brands
The scale of what inMusic now controls is worth stating plainly. Under one company: Akai, Moog, M-Audio, Denon DJ, Numark, Rane, Alesis, Native Instruments, Traktor, Kontakt, Maschine, iZotope, Plugin Alliance, and Brainworx. Hardware controllers, iconic synthesiser brands, DJ software and hardware, sample-based production environments, mixing and mastering plugins, and professional audio repair tools — all run from Rhode Island.
The music tech industry has been consolidating for years, and this deal accelerates that trend sharply. Whether consolidation at this scale produces better-resourced development or simply thinner attention spread across a larger catalogue is the question the community will be watching closely. The Moog outcome is the one data point available. One is not a pattern, but it is better than nothing.
All Good, Let’s Move on
All Native Instruments products — including Komplete, Kontakt, Traktor, Maschine, iZotope, Plugin Alliance, and Brainworx titles — remain available for purchase, download, and activation during the transition period. The acquisition is expected to close in the coming weeks. Full details at the official Native Instruments announcement.
