The synths and plugins that show up in half the house and techno sessions on the planet just changed hands, again. On 1 July 2026, iZotope, the company behind RX, Ozone and Neutron, left Native Instruments and joined Boris FX. On the same stretch of days, inMusic finished buying Native Instruments outright. If you make music with Kontakt, Traktor, Maschine or Massive, the company you were quietly trusting is not the company you thought.
How did a beloved tools maker end up in pieces?
Rewind to late January 2026: Native Instruments entered preliminary insolvency proceedings. Its owner at the time was the private-equity firm Francisco Partners, which had bolted the company together with iZotope, Plugin Alliance and Brainworx into a group called Soundwide. Reported figures tell the story: a debt load of roughly 250 million pounds sitting on top of annual revenue of around 25 million pounds. That is not a business with a bad quarter. That is a business engineered to carry debt it could never realistically service.
A maker of the tools we all use almost died under private-equity debt, then got carved up. That is the story here, not the press release about a fresh roadmap.
Who owns what after the split?
In May 2026, Francisco Partners sold the Native Instruments brand to inMusic. After the dust settled, Brainworx and Plugin Alliance stay with inMusic under Native Instruments, while iZotope has been carved out to Boris FX, a visual-effects and audio software house. Boris FX CEO Boris Yamnitsky framed the buy around the tech: "iZotope is known for its smart and practical use of AI... we're positioned to move faster, innovate further." iZotope's Todd Baker went out of his way to calm producers: "There are no interruptions to plugin development... this move provides the resources and focus needed to supercharge our roadmap." Licenses and subscriptions stay fully active, with uninterrupted support.
Why does one owner holding Traktor and Denon DJ matter?
Here is the part the scene should sit with. inMusic already owns Akai, Alesis, Denon DJ and Rane. Add Native Instruments and it now controls Traktor plus Denon DJ, Rane and Engine DJ: a huge slice of the DJ software and hardware stack under a single roof. Concentration like that shapes what gets built, what gets dropped and what a booth looks like five years from now. The tools are fine today. The question is who steers them tomorrow.
