Arturia
A French company that made its name emulating classic synths in software, then started building affordable analogue synths for real.
Frédéric Brun and Gilles Pommereuil founded Arturia in Grenoble in 1999. The breakthrough came in 2003 with Moog Modular V, a software take on Moog's modular system that Robert Moog himself endorsed. The company called its approach TAE, True Analog Emulation, and the point was to reproduce the quirks of the analogue circuits — the saturating filter, the drifting oscillators — rather than just their schematics.
The emulations were gathered into V Collection, which now spans dozens of instruments from the Minimoog to the Fairlight. In 2012 came the MiniBrute, a genuine analogue synth at a price that squeezed the whole market, followed by controllers such as the KeyStep and BeatStep. Arturia, in other words, first copied other people's hardware in software and then began making the hardware others now copy.