CDM reports today that Native Instruments has filed for “preliminary insolvency”.
Preliminary Insolvency is a court-orded phase where an administrator steps in to protect debtors’ assets, and to see if changes can be made to enable a company to stabilize its financial situation.
In the case of Native Instruments, as of Jan 26, 2026:
- Enforcement measures, including the execution of an attachment or a preliminary injunction against the debtor, are prohibited, unless immovable property is affected; measures already commenced are temporarily suspended.
- Mr. Prof. Dr. Torsten Martini, Attorney at Law, has been appointed as provisional insolvency administrator. Dispositions by the debtor concerning assets of the debtor’s estate are only valid with the consent of the provisional insolvency administrator.
Dr Martini’s role is to secure the debtor’s assets, and to determine whether the debtor (NI) is capable of covering their debts. He will create a special account to manage payments coming in to Native Instruments, and will collect these funds and disburse them as he determins appropriate. To fulfull this role, he will have full access to Native’s facilities, books and business documents.
The announcement is a huge one for Native Instruments and its customers, and reflects both industry struggles since the pandemic and broader trends of industry consolidation.
Native Instruments was founded in 1996, and was one of the first companies to capitalize on the emergence of software synthesizers. For many years, the core of its business was offering a suite of virtual versions of ‘bread and butter’ electronic instruments, including synths and electronic keyboards. In recent years, though, the company had focused much of its energy on content.
NI has been facing stiffer competition in the virtual instruments space from companies like Arturia and Cherry Audio, which have been moving faster to introduced new virtual instruments, and the growing category of synth knockoffs from Behringer, which is now offering hardware instruments that are competitive with many of NI’s virtual instruments.
We’ve included the original German Preliminary Insolvency announcement below.
3612 IN 602/26
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In dem Verfahren über den Antrag
NATIVE INSTRUMENTS GmbH,
Schlesische Straße 29 – 30, 10997 Berlin,
vertreten durch den Geschäftsführer Bernhard Schütze
Registergericht: Amtsgericht Charlottenburg HRB 72458
– Schuldnerin –
Geschäftszweig: Entwicklung, Vermarktung und Vertrieb von Software, Hardware, Inhalten und Dienstleistungen in den Bereichen Musik und Audiotechnologie
auf Eröffnung des Insolvenzverfahrens über das eigene Vermögen
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Beschluss:
Zur Verhinderung nachteiliger Veränderungen in der Vermögenslage der Schuldnerin bis zur Entscheidung über den Antrag wird am 26.01.2026 um 17:15 Uhr angeordnet (§§ 21, 22 InsO):
1. Maßnahmen der Zwangsvollstreckung einschließlich der Vollziehung eines Arrestes oder einer einstweiligen Verfügung gegen die Schuldnerin werden untersagt, soweit nicht unbewegliche Gegenstände betroffen sind; bereits begonnene Maßnahmen werden einstweilen eingestellt (§ 21 Abs. 2 Nr. 3 InsO).
2. Zum vorläufigen Insolvenzverwalter wird
Herr Rechtsanwalt Prof. Dr. Torsten Martini
Kantstraße 164, 10623 Berlin
bestellt.
Verfügungen der Schuldnerin über Gegenstände des schuldnerischen Vermögens sind nur noch mit Zustimmung des vorläufigen Insolvenzverwalters wirksam (§ 21 Abs. 2 Nr. 2 2. Alternative InsO).
Der vorläufige Insolvenzverwalter ist nicht der allgemeine Vertreter der Schuldnerin. Er hat die Aufgabe, durch Überwachung der Schuldnerin deren Vermögen zu sichern und zu erhalten (§ 22 Abs. 1 Satz 2 Nr. 1 InsO). Der vorläufige Insolvenzverwalter hat zu prüfen, ob das Vermögen der Schuldnerin die Kosten des Verfahrens decken wird (§ 22 Abs. 1 Satz 2 Nr. 3 InsO).
Der vorläufige Insolvenzverwalter wird ermächtigt, für die zukünftige Insolvenzmasse ein Sonderkonto einzurichten und zu führen, Bankguthaben und sonstige Forderungen der Schuldnerin einzuziehen sowie eingehende Gelder entgegenzunehmen.
Die Konten der Schuldnerin führenden Kreditinstitute werden dem vorläufigen Insolvenzverwalter gegenüber zur Auskunftserteilung verpflichtet.
Den Schuldnern der Schuldnerin (Drittschuldnern) wird verboten, an die Schuldnerin zu zahlen. Sie werden aufgefordert, Leistungen unter Beachtung dieser Anordnung nur noch an den vorläufigen Insolvenzverwalter zu leisten (§ 23 Abs. 1 Satz 3 InsO).
Gem. § 8 Abs. 3 InsO wird der vorläufige Insolvenzverwalter beauftragt, die Zustellungen des Beschlusses an die Schuldner der Schuldnerin vorzunehmen (§ 23 Abs. 1 Satz 2 InsO) und hierüber Nachweis zu führen.
Der vorläufige Insolvenzverwalter ist berechtigt, die Geschäftsräume und betrieblichen Einrichtungen der Schuldnerin einschließlich der Nebenräume zu betreten und dort Nachforschungen anzustellen. Die Schuldnerin hat ihm Einsicht in die Bücher und Geschäftspapiere zu gestatten und sie diesem auf Verlangen bis zur Entscheidung über die Eröffnung des Verfahrens herauszugeben. Sie hat ihm alle Auskünfte zu erteilen, die zur Sicherung der künftigen Insolvenzmasse und zur Aufklärung der schuldnerischen Vermögensverhältnisse erforderlich sind.
Hinweis:
Die in einem elektronischen Informations- und Kommunikationssystem erfolgte Veröffentlichung wird dort mindestens für die Dauer der Wirksamkeit der Anordnung gespeichert. Im Falle der Eröffnung erfolgt eine Löschung spätestens sechs Monate nach der Aufhebung oder der Rechtskraft der Einstellung des Verfahrens (§ 3 Abs. 1 S. 1 InsOBekV); falls nicht eröffnet wird, erfolgt eine Löschung spätestens sechs Monate nach Aufhebung der veröffentlichten Sicherungsmaßnahme (§ 3 Abs. 1 S. 2 InsOBekV).
Let us know what you think of this news in the comments!
I love Maschine. Please don’t take it away 🙁
Nah, MPC is much better.
NI stuff has been weird for a while now.
Mostly sample libraries.
This genuinely sucks for anyone who might potentially loose their jobs.
However, this has been waiting to happen for a while.
The writing was on the wall.
I don’t like touch based workflows. MPC has a lot of buttons but there are a lot of grating little things that require touchscreen use.
And Maschine sound library is way better than anything Akai has put out which is 90% rap/rnb/trap. Things are improving with Live III and XL though but Maschine still has the best fully hardware workflow… better than Push 3.
It’s trivial to convert Maschine libraries to MPC.
I think 12 or 13 was the last time I bothered with anything other than Kontakt. And I’m 99% positive that, should NI fold, either Akai or Spitfire will buy Kontakt from the wreckage.
Maschine software and hardware is by far better than MPC’s, the best groovebox in the market, NI software can’t compare to inmusic software in any way. NI its in problems from last years and customers note this in the company strategies, its sad.
Just about everyone saw this coming, but seeing it in black and white is a sad day for music makers. The real issue is Kontakt. To say that platform has cornered the sampling library market doesn’t do it justice. It’s a near-total domination of the thousands of libraries out there. Someone like Apple or Arturia or Yamaha/Roland/Korg is going to have to take it over. I’ve been a Komplete owner for twenty years, and while I don’t use NI tools nearly as much as I did in the past, losing Kontakt is not an option for me or the industry.
Insolvency you say? Weird, it’s almost like dubstep got really big 15 YEARS AGO, dubstep artists like Skrillex said they used NI products, NI made a bunch of money fast, the NI marketing team then took over (bad), their follow up cash grab Massive X was unfinished on launch and weird to use, that alienated new and longtime users and made them question spending money yearly with NI, then other companies/people made better products of their flagship products (Serum – free updates forever, Spitfire, Splice for god’s sake, stock DAW’s got awesome, Neural DSP for guitar stuff, Kontakt has a bunch of great libraries but a lot were becoming standalone, but again Splice existed now, etc). Then NI forgot to code things to work well (nothing worse than not knowing why your sound library/presets aren’t showing up for no reason or needing to relink files over and over again or the biggest issue of their plugins just crashing your session). Mac Silicon broke EVERYTHING related to NI and they took SO LONG to do anything about it that artists decided the hassle of managing a bunch of NI products they never used anymore and sounded worse and was less flexible than the competition reminded them of how bad it was trying to keep up with Waves-style BS updates and then just stopped updating because instead of a more palatable $99 update from ANY previous version, like it was forever, it was somehow now private equity (kiss of death) approved $199 (the cost of the ENTIRETY of logic pro!) to update their STANDARD komplete version, again which they barely used anymore, and then people just left forever…am i missing anything?
Half of NI’s products are BS sample playback VSTs that have a built in sequencer. Massive yawn, they had it coming when they fired the hardware teams in 2019!
While NI has made some bad decisions, the debt isn’t their fault. They were bought by a private equity firm, that took on the debt to afford the buyout and then transferred that debt to NI. That’s the reason they are in insolvency. It’s predatory capitalism, not mismanagement.
The merge with Plugin Alliance was weird. iZotope has great products, but Plugin Alliance only has a handful of good stuff.
I own a lot of stuff from NI, including a keyboard, so seing them going out would be a bad news.
@Un Herisson you beat me to it. But how are they in such bad shape having PA and iZotope under them now? Didn’t they just buy out PA not that long ago? Sounds like bad management…
I would imagine charging hundreds of dollars for yearly upgrades (Izotope) and then on the other end selling plugins for pennies (Plugin Alliance) is not a great business model. I would pay $99 for an upgrade from Ozone 11 to Ozone 12, not $300.
Shame about Kontakt though. A lot of my favorite Kontakt developers have started making their own plugins and now I understand why. Wonder what this will mean for companies like Slate and Ash.
They can make kontakt open source and do something right. If kontakt is open source it will improve exponentially
Plus Reaktor !!
It’s not up to them anymore. The external insolvency administrator has the task of liquidating all assets to pay off the debts, so turning anything open source is out of the question.
With how they treat their customers one-on-one, this is no surprise.
Yeah, they were never shining examples of customer service. I’m just wondering where all of that clever IP could wind up. They have some great libraries. It’d be messy to sell them off piecemeal. A full liquidation might be more work than its worth, when you consider the surely angry customer base. I feel for people who are deeply invested in Kontakt.
Wrong, actually they were! Back in the day, I got a super attractive crossgrade offer from Kore to Maschine although I had bought Kore secondhand… then, they sent me a hi gloss booklet about the company’s beginnings and a T shirt free of charge to Tokyo for the 10th anniversary (I was a Generator launch customer)…and THEN things went south: squeezing the cash cow like there’s no tomorrow- and look where that took them. Serves them right!
Someone there had/has horrendous guidance. For a while I had all NI hardware products at once and it was great but then they started to EOL stuff too quick, killing hardware thru software (Maschine MK2 and Kontrol MK1), too many controllers like S5 killed quick, tech support took months to get a hold of, new stuff in Komplete was just sample libraries, product keys dead in service center that did not carry over Native Access, native Access was horrible too… while at the same time other companies just came up with better stuff, better support, more original ideas… Open source your old hardware and forever the software for people who bought it. Sorry for the employees but zero sympathy for the leadership.
My sympathies to those who still rely on NI software (especially Kontakt), but it’s honestly no surprise.
Used to love using FM7, Pro-Five & Reaktor 3.0 in the early noughties, but had no interest in their newer products. They just struck me as a yet another sprawling software company trying to stuff as much as possible in their gaping maw and that would inevitably lead to entropy and death. While the NI story is not a textbook definition of enshittifcation, it overlaps in the Venn diagram of tech degradation and scale leading to indifference to the user base.
While I want Music Technology to flourish, I’m not too sad to see NI go.
I don’t even know how many times I gave their Player a shot, because it was the only way I could use library so-and-so. I don’t even know how many times I got totally puzzled by the installation process. I don’t know how many times I randomly clicked through their user interface, hoping to achieve something rather simple: selecting a patch.
It always felt clunky, Windows-y (I’m a Mac snob).
Every single time, I decided to delete the whole installation, feeling big relief, and a bit of embarrassment after such abuse.
Maybe they will reincarnate in a the shape of a lightweight angel. That would be great.
Aside from NI’s products, energy costs in Germany have put a lot of companies out of business, even those that aren’t your typical manufacturer with a factory ect. If your margins are fine to start with then a near doubling of energy costs is going to be fatal.
But let us not forget NI investing money and manpower to upgrade basically everything to so-called “gender language” for Germany, making reading documents, mails, articles a pain (especially for people with disabilities). It seemed more important to use incorrect language with wrong grammar to please a certain communitiy than to keep their stuff together and set priorities accordingly.
Yes, I’m sure being respectful of other humans is surely what put them out of business. You must be American.
Your comment reads as overly reactionary and says a lot more about you than NI or anyone else.
Daniel is right
NI was killed by vulture Capitalism. Mainly, the debt load created by the buyout and the detrimental effects that had on innovation in the company, not woke narratives. Stop trying to turn every single thing in the world to culture war nonsense.
I bought into the Kore thing big time back in the day. Bought the 1st gen Kore controller that arrived DOA and support was a nightmare to deal with. Had to return it on my own dime AND pay for shipping back to me. That really stung… but I went with it on and on up to version 2 and had invested in the Kore libraries. All my workflow was Kore quite literally, tens to hundreds of hours converting everything to Kore and with something like 4 or 5 days notice to buy the soundpacks you wanted, they EOL’d it. The only ‘support’ I got from N.I and forums was “move to Maschine” Naw thanks!
I got an anniversary thingy with a NI t-shirt and I think that was the best it got.
Pro-52/3, Impakt, Kontakt, Spektral Delay, Vokator, Absynth (hooray for a brief revival!) Zero-G libs… sigh… Komplete Care was a komplete joke.
It will be devastating for the industry and the community if N.I. and its many branches (K)completely disappear but the kindest thing I can say about them is they were brilliant back in the day – until they weren’t.
Some of us have been here before.
It is sad to see NI arrive at this point… I have been with them since Generator and Transformator (aka Reaktor). Thirty years ago!
They were making some of the best cutting edge music making plugins and instruments. But then they got spread too thin catering to the traktor and machine crowd.
I think NI was trying to be too many things to too many people. Maybe with the reorg they can find their soul again.
o no now i need to learn bitwig to keep using my loved maschine hardware. will probably be an improvement in the long term. hope the note repeat function is well integrated. and yes i too had bad experiences with their tech-support. basicly had to do my own support with them as tim wasting non-knowledgeable disturbers. did not solve the issue just had to give up out of frustration. ow and the sample library is good but cluttered as hell it feels way too heavy.
i still have vouchers for 5 expansions more but everytime i visited their website for some free shopping i just gave up after some more wasted time being lost in the woods
Many of us have a SUBSTANTIAL investment in your CRAP NI, get you head out of your ass or refund our money, your not going to get away with this!
You think they should refund your money, or they’ll go bankrupt. It sounds like you’re a financial mastermind!
“your not going to get away with this!”
Lots of businesses ‘get away with’ going bankrupt, every single year. lol
Wonder if the private equity investment staved off the inevitable or hastened it.
It’s honestly rather unbelievable how badly they fucked up there market share. Everyone was Using NI 10 to 15 years ago. They were innovators in software and then hardware software Hybrid with Kore than Maschine but they wanted to do like 100 things at once instead of being really good at a few and they completely lost their way. I remember when the discontinued Kore the backlash was heavy, then they basically just did the same idea with Komplete control a few years late. One thing that was obvious to me was that the departments were not working together as well as they could have hence how you can have groundbreaking realtime time stretching in both Kontakt and Traktor but Maschine still lacks what most people would consider state of the art Time Stretching, honestly it drives me a bit nuts because I was an early Maschine adopter and advocate but their development of the product line was insane. Oh and thats right was the awesome Maschine Jam that got left in the dust too. Ugh, rant over.
Native Instruments used to be the coolest, nerdiest high-end music technology company out there. It was a brand for innovators, offering complex and brilliant tools like Reaktor or Absynth.
But as the company grew into a corporation, the visionaries were replaced by a board of directors. They shifted the focus from groundbreaking synthesis to a boring business model of churning out endless sample libraries, prioritizing energy toward identity and diversity-politics initiatives instead of the product.
The recent news is nothing but the final chapter of a long decline. It’s frustrating, but I’m glad now that I sold my beloved Maschine MK3 a couple of years ago.
When NI obsoleted advanced features of the original S line keyboards and retired Absynth I got the sense that inertia in their codebase was killing NI. Perhaps they don’t have modern internal processes for development and testing. Tethered hardware products controlling software seems to be a hard nut to crack long term. The hardware suggests one time purchase, yet the software demands ongoing maintenance that fits a subscription model better (from the companys perspective). If you’re not paying a subscription then you’re on the clock while new purchases sustain continued development. Ironically AI could help to reduce some of these maintenance costs, if they survive long enough to make use of it.
It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. If they truly go kaput, how long until Native Access is down and we can no longer authorize the software we paid for.
Good luck getting anyone to spend a penny on the product until this issue is resolved.
Nothing whips up the fan base like the suggestion that you’re headed for the dust bin. It can’t help their bottom line to lose possible new buyers over this. It will also be interesting to see where Kontakt Player ends up, as X number of manufacturers employ it. Oh boy, an added bit of secondary operating stress.
Let’s hear it for smaller places with 5-15 staffers who do solid work and still find time to answer phone calls and e-mails.