Cockos Incorporated

What does Cockos own?
Cockos owns REAPER, its digital audio workstation, plus supporting projects including NINJAM, ReaPlugs, JSFX, and the WDL development library.

Is Cockos publicly traded?
No. Cockos is privately held by founder Justin Frankel and has never taken outside investment or announced any listing plans.

Who founded Cockos?
Justin Frankel founded Cockos in 2004 after leaving Nullsoft. He is best known for creating the Winamp media player and the Gnutella protocol.

Where is Cockos headquartered?
Cockos' postal address is in Rosendale, New York, in Ulster County. The company operates largely as a distributed development team.

How many brands does Cockos own?
One principal product brand, REAPER, alongside a set of free utilities and developer tools.

Who owns Cockos?
Justin Frankel owns and leads the company as president. There are no institutional investors or parent companies.

Justin Frankel founded Cockos in 2004 after departing Nullsoft, where he had built Winamp and the Gnutella file-sharing protocol. The company name is an inside reference: a misheard line from the film Office Space.

Early Cockos releases were utilities and experiments. Jesusonic, a programmable effects processor, arrived in December 2004, and NINJAM, an internet jam tool that let musicians improvise together with latency disguised as metered delay, followed in 2005 under an open-source license.

REAPER, released in late 2005 as shareware-style beta software, became the business. Frankel iterated in public, shipping builds and folding user feedback into weekly updates. Longtime collaborator Christophe Thibault, a Nullsoft colleague, worked on the product until 2014; programmer John Schwartz joined in 2008 and remains the other principal developer.

Rather than scale the company, Frankel kept it small. Development is done by the core pair with named outside contributors handling documentation and interface work. Cockos' postal address has wandered with its founder: San Francisco early on, then New York City, and since roughly 2024 a post office box in Rosendale, New York, a small town in Ulster County.

REAPER's economics sustained the model. Licenses sold directly through the website at $60 for qualifying users and $225 for commercial use funded two decades of continuous development without venture capital, advertising, or subscription obligations.