FXpansion acquired by ROLI

Mmmmm - I wonder what this will bring?

We’re thrilled to announce
that FXpansion has been acquired by ROLI,
a fellow leader in music technology innovation — and the company behind the Seaboard,
the multidimensionally expressive instrument acclaimed as “the
future of the keyboard.”

Together with ROLI, we'll keep pushing the boundaries of innovation in audio
software development. We're looking forward to integrating our technologies
over the long term — while continuing to develop and support the FXpansion
products that you know and love.

How does this change affect you? There are no immediate changes to our
products, and it's business as usual. You’ll continue to access registered
products and downloads through your user account and receive the same product
support via our Support
Hub. Our development team will continue to provide the maintenance updates
you expect. We're pushing forward with exciting new products and updates
including BFD 3.2 and Cypher2, and will continue to create expansion packs and
engaging educational videos.

In coming months you’ll see early signs of collaboration. But it’s in the long
term that you’ll really feel the benefits of our partnership, as we combine our
expertise across music hardware and software to develop amazingly expressive
instruments — and update FXpansion products to make them better than ever
before.

Whether you’re a new customer or have been with us since Angus created his
first virtual instruments, we’re deeply grateful for your support and
encouragement. It’s been 15 years since our first fully featured virtual
instrument, the drum synthesiser/sampler DR008. Since then we’ve built a much
larger collection of sounds, effects and instruments that have won numerous
awards. We’re confident that we’ll develop even better versions of our products
as we begin working together with ROLI.

It is interesting. Sock it to me.

People from the Laugh In generation. Great!
 
This one seems odd. I can't see that company having the revenue to buy FXpansion.
 
 

kitekrazy1
This one seems odd. I can't see that company having the revenue to buy FXpansion.
 

 
According to this article, ROLI has raised venture capital of almost $40m in the last two years. Probably they will have to show the investors that they are actually using that money on something, other than their peculiar looking rubber-keyed MIDI controller.
 
Given the acquisition of FXpansion, maybe a new electronic drum interface is on the horizon?
 

I would expect that Fxpansion will start aggressively adding MPE capabilities to their synths.  The ROLI keyboard is a pretty wonderful device, but there aren't a lot of "targets" that can take advantage of the MPE data stream.  So, it makes sense ROLI would use some of their investment capital to buy into soft-synth technology rather than developing that sort of thing from the ground up.  Why Fxpansion in particular?  That's the really interesting point to upon which to speculate, IMO.  Could well be there are just some personal connections between ROLI and Fxpansion folks that guided things in this direction.

So now we'll have mushy drums?