History

Arturia was founded in 1999 in Grenoble by INPG engineers Frédéric Brun and Gilles Pommereuil to create affordable software synthesizers. The first product they developed was Storm, a virtual instrument workstation.^[2] The close emulation of classic analog synthesizers helped the company gain popularity in its market.^[3] In order to create sounds with minimal digital artifacts, Brun and Pommereuil  developed new software algorithms to eliminate these issues.^[4]

In 2003, using the algorithms they had developed, Arturia worked with Robert Moog to create the Modular V softsynth. The Modular V uses Arturia’s True Analog Emulation (TAE) in an attempt to faithfully reproduce the oscillators, filters, and other modules from the Moog 3C and Moog 55.^[4][5] Following these releases, Arturia continued to develop software emulations of well known synthesizers, including the ARP 2600, Roland Jupiter-8, Minimoog, and Sequential Circuits Prophet-5.

In 2007, Arturia combined sounds from several of their softsynth titles into Analog Factory, which offered 2000 preset synthesizer patches,^[6] offering this the following year as Analog Experience, a hybrid system which combined the software with a MIDI keyboard controller specifically designed to play and control it.^[7]

Arturia entered the hardware synthesizer market in 2012 with the MiniBrute, a vintage-style 25-key monophonic analog synthesizer with one voltage controlled oscillator, two low-frequency oscillators, and a multimode Steiner-Parker filter.^[8] The synthesizer was introduced at the 2012 NAMM Show.^[9] Despite pre-production uncertainty about sales, the MiniBrute sold well due to its low price point and expressive sound.^[10] In the following year, Arturia announced their next hardware synthesizer, the MicroBrute, a smaller and less expensive version of the MiniBrute with minikeys, a patch bank, and a sequencer.^[11] Both synthesizers received critical acclaim.^[10]