Native Instruments and EMH Partners announce sale of majority ownership to Francisco Partners

Berlin-based music technology company Native Instruments, makers of the Guitar Rig line of software plugins, has today announced an agreement with EMH Partners and Francisco Partners to sell the majority of the company’s shares to Francisco Partners. Both EMH Partners and the founding shareholders will continue their involvement in NI’s operations as minority shareholders. Francisco Partners specialises in technology investment, and will support NI in improving its product experiences.

As MusicTech reports, the agreement comes four years after EMH Partners invested €50 million into Native Instruments, with another investment in 2020 to gain majority ownership in the brand. Its investment led to 1.5 million monthly active users on NI by the end of 2020 – more than double the original number – along with a 60 per cent increase on NI’s music creation tools.

With Francisco Partners, NI says it “intends on enhancing its product experiences”, building on the company’s technological innovations and connections within the community and industry, in a bid to create more seamless experiences for music creators using its products.

Native Instruments CEO Constantin Koehncke said of the change: “There’s never been a more exciting time in music, with more creators producing more high-quality music all around the world. We’re thrilled to team up with Francisco Partners to enter the next phase of our journey, combining their global resources and expertise with our passionate team, deep relationships within music and proven track record of technical innovation. Together we can realize our mission to empower and inspire the global community of music creators and help them to unlock their creative potential.

Thanks to the support of EMH Partners over the past years we were able to further reinforce and expand our position as the leading digital music creation company, and now look forward to working with Francisco Partners, EMH Partners and the founding shareholders to continue on this amazing journey.”

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