[4][5] Ableton was founded in 1999 by Gerhard Behles and Robert Henke, who together formed the group Monolake, and software engineer Bernd Roggendorf.

The patches act like other plug-ins in Live do, supporting preset saving, automation, and other features.

"[12] In April 2015, Ableton published the hardcover book Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers written by Dennis DeSantis who is the Head of Documentation at Ableton and formerly a sound designer for Native Instruments.

In June 2017, Ableton acquired Cycling '74, developers of the digital signal processing environment Max/MSP and its integrated version Max for Live.

[14][15] In March 2013, the company released the Push controller for Live 9 in cooperation with Akai Professional.