Private equity firm Francisco Partners did a leveraged buyout to gain majority control in 2021 and then quickly loaded the company up with even more debt by acquiring other smaller music companies. So, five years to reach insolvency is right about on time.

Very sad because 25 years ago NI were innovators in real-time audio DSP running on general purpose CPUs and their more recent Kontrol series of MIDI keyboards are quite good. For anyone who wants more details I found this blog post from an industry insider with some analysis and financial history: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-i-think-native-instrument...