[6] Neural DSP began recruiting designers in late 2017 and early 2018, and in that April released the "Darkglass Ultra" plug-in, followed in September by the "Fortin Nameless,"[6] which was the company's first major success.

[7] The public profile these plug-ins created for Neural DSP allowed the company to pursue the creation of its companion hardware device, the Quad Cortex.

With companies like Fractal and Universal Audio having achieved great levels of accuracy in recreating amp tones, Neural emphasized significantly improving the user experience as the route to the Cortex's success.

[1] In 2024, Neural revealed they had developed a robot—known as a Telemetric Inductive Nodal Actuator, or TINA—that manually controls an amplifier being modeled and records and annotates the results to facilitate audio processing, in a combination of robotic data collection and machine learning.

Artists with signature plug-ins include Henson, Wong, Plini, Gojira, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine,[10] and John Petrucci of Dream Theater.

It also had features competitors like the Fractal Axe-FX and the Line 6 Helix floor modelers did not, like a touch screen interface, Wifi connectivity, and footswitches that combine stomp functionality with rotary actuators.