While the DJ community continues to watch Native Instruments with a simplistic “when will we see Traktor Pro 4?” lens, the Berlin-based company has been busy raising cash. They’ve received a massive investment of $ 59,000,000 from EMH, a private equity firm. Keep reading for the details.
As reported on Crunchbase, Native Instruments raised €50 million (~$ 59 million) from EMH, private equity firm “providing growth capital for technology-enabled companies”. EMH did this under their Digital Growth Fund – which is “dedicated to the digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Europe” according to InvestmentEurope.net, “Native Instruments marks the fund’s first investment in a music technology company./”
This might feel familiar to previous massive business moves in the industry. Top of mind is when Pioneer sold their DJ division to investment firm KKR for $ 550 million. In the years following, we’ve seen Pioneer DJ start churning out non-stop product updates to all of their lines with a focus on maximizing return on investment. It’s not hard to imagine
“Native Instruments will continue to improve upon several of its existing products aimed at innovating around the DJ-producer experience, including the popular DJing software Traktor and the Stems technology, which breaks tracks into its component parts for live remixing.” – Billboard
Fifty million dollars is a lot of cash – but when receiving such a large sum from an investment firm, there’s often a very clear plan for how that investment will pay out. Native Instruments’ leadership would have been expected to present a number of profitable solutions to problems that a large financial investment could solve for the company.
Here’s a few totally speculative high level problems that I can easily imagine being on their shortlist:
There does seem to be a big focus on the future of music creation, not curation, in the language around the investment. We suspect this is because, historically, music production appears to have been the biggest money-maker for NI. Check out this quote from their CTO:
“We believe music creation products and services should be integrated in a more appealing, intuitive and cohesive way. We foresee an easily accessible music creation ecosystem that connects user centric design, with powerful technology and data, to further enable the music creators of today, and welcome the new creators of tomorrow.” – Mate Galic, CTO and President of Native Instruments
One thing is very clear from the coverage of this financial transaction: Native Instruments wants to first focus on getting the right people employed in their offices to take on the challenges.
If you’ve watched the company’s Careers page over the last year, it’s seemed that there’s a gap in leadership on the DJ side of the company. They continue to look for Director Of DJ Products – someone to create and drive software/hardware visions forward.
“Native Instruments will be focused on recruiting tech talent in Berlin, Los Angeles and London in the coming year. The company has made a handful of key hires in Berlin and Los Angeles over the last 12 months — including the acquisition of remix monetization startup MetaPop, whose former CEO Matthew Adell now serves as Native Instruments’ chief digital officer.”- Billboard
Chime in! What do you think Native Instruments should/will do with their massive cash influx? Let us know in the comments below.
Autore: Dan White DJ TechTools
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