E-mu

Unofficially founded in 1970 by Scott Wedge and Dave Rossum, E-mu began making modular synthesizers. In 1972, E-mu officially became a company, developing and patenting a digitally scanned polyphonic keyboard (1973), licensed for use by Oberheim Electronics in the 4-Voice and 8-Voice synthesizers and by Dave Smith in the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5. E-mu, along with Solid State Microtechnologies, also developed several synthesizer module IC chips, that were used by both E-mu and many other synthesizer companies.