Francisco Partners Buys Majority Stake In Native Instruments

Berlin-based Native Instruments, the creator of Traktor DJ, has announced a take over by technology investors Francisco Partners. The takeover from EHM Partners and the founding shareholders aims to allow Native Instruments to create “end-to-end user-centric platform for the music creation industry”. 

Native Instruments has been experiencing an upturn in fortune recently. After an initial 50 million euro investment by EHM Partners in 2017, EHM increased its stake to control the company in 2020. The takeover came with a shake-up to the leadership with founding partner and CEO Daniel Haver stepping aside last year. This move coinciding with a significant restructure of the business with widespread redundancies.

Recently releasing the long-awaited stand-alone Maschine+, Native Instruments has experienced a growth in monthly users. Revenue is also up, a rumoured 60%. The plan under the new management is now to consolidate the companies products and services. Bringing together the companies platforms to create one seamless platform from music creation to performance. 

What about Traktor DJ?

With an estimated eight out of ten tracks in the charts using Native Instrument technology, it has felt that Native Instruments had recently forgotten and abandoned Traktor. The company was instead focusing all its efforts on music production software. With strong rumours of Traktor being sold to British based Allen & Heath last year, will this new investment finally bring some life back to the Traktor brand?  It is notable that Traktor isn’t specifically mentioned in the takeover press release, found here. However, Trakor’s lead Dr Pedram Faghfouri yesterday posted inside the Traktor forum, indicating that the team is indeed hard at updating Traktor.

“We really appreciate your feedback and questions on this topic. Please rest assured that we are working hard on the future of TRAKTOR. Our main focus right now is the development and next major update of TRAKTOR PRO, which will combine efforts and learnings from TRAKTOR DJ and TRAKTOR PRO 3. We want to work together with you on this next big release, so in the coming days, we will be posting a survey to gather all of your feedback and requests. In the meantime, regarding Apple’s new line of ARM processors, we will soon be releasing TRAKTOR PRO 3.4.1. This update will ensure full compatibility with both macOS Big Sur and Apple Silicon M1 computers. Feel free to download the beta version here. Stay tuned for more TRAKTOR PRO 3 updates in the coming months” – Dr Pedram Faghfouri

The take over is due to complete in Q3 of 2021. We will be watching closely to see how the added capital and business acumen of Francisco Partners affects Native Instruments performance, especially in developing Traktor to become once again a class-leading DJ software. 

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