What the Room Was Saying at Possible
Ad Age House ran a session called Inside the Deal — Will Lee, CEO of Adweek moderating, with Michael Kassan from 3CV, Anuj Mathur from Moelis, Leonard Tessler, and Sanford Michaelman on the panel. The conversation covered the state of M&A markets and the 12-18 month outlook. Two things stood out.
Rollups in fragmented categories are the PE thesis right now.
What they're hearing from PE firms isn't "find me this deal" — it's "find me a fragmented category to consolidate." Tech being cheaper has fragmented agency and creator-platform markets, which makes roll-up math work where it didn't before. They explicitly flagged that when two players already control 40% of a category, PE backs away — the hurdles are too high.
AI is breaking reps and warranties.
A recent deal closed April 1 where the seller flatly refused to make standard non-infringement reps because their product had AI underlying it. The logic: copyright violation is binary, but LLMs trained on infringed material produce derivative outputs you can't unscramble. Buyers are starting to mark that bucket of revenue to zero or wrap it in warranty insurance. Insurance carriers are beginning to design AI-specific products. Worth flagging this in your own diligence frameworks — it'll become standard.
12-18 month outlook:
Legacy media: heavy consolidation, driven by cost rationalization. Warner Bros Discovery referenced as the template.
Marketing/adtech/martech: lots of take-privates of sub-$2B public companies. Bar to remain public is rising fast, and the IPO wave (SpaceX, Anthropic, $30B+ names) will force funds to sell smaller positions to fund those allocations.
Macro: bumpy. Tariff/geopolitical uncertainty is keeping dry powder parked. Hockey-stick recovery isn’t here until that resolves — could be November, could be two years.
Deal #1: Brkthru + Gigawatt
On April 16th, Brkthru — a Detroit-area digital media agency, roughly 170 employees, fully bootstrapped and privately owned — acquired Gigawatt, a Milwaukee-area programmatic shop founded by Adam Perrick in 2019. Estimated five to nine people, sub-$5M revenue. Financial terms not disclosed.
The press release framing: strengthening Breakthrough’s integrated media capabilities with deep expertise in hospitality and tourism.
The real story is the process.
In January 2026, Brkthru announced publicly that they were launching an acquisition program for 2026. No banker involved — fees don’t justify the time on deals this size. What the announcement did was function as top-of-funnel corp dev. They told the market what they were looking for, generated inbound, and closed their first deal three months later.
That’s a smart, capital-efficient way to run M&A as a bootstrapped operator. The announcement does the sourcing work that institutional buyers usually pay bankers to do.
The thesis is also deliberately low-risk. This isn’t a capability gap fill into unknown territory. Brkthru already plays in hospitality and tourism. Gigawatt is a programmatic shop that goes deeper into a vertical they already know. The business models are similar. The integration lift is manageable. If they can’t pull off a deal this aligned on paper, they find out now — on a small deal, while it’s still recoverable — before scaling the program.
The broader takeaway: you do not need institutional capital to run an M&A strategy. Creativity and alignment are the currency in the sub-$5M deal market. The wild west of deal making is open to any operator willing to run the process.
Deal #2: Instacart + InstaLeap
On April 14th, Instacart announced the acquisition of InstaLeap — a Bogota-founded grocery technology company started in 2019, serving nearly 100 grocery retailers across roughly 30 countries, primarily in Latin America with presence in Europe and the Middle East. The platform has powered over 100 million transactions. Financial terms not disclosed.
Most coverage framed this as Instacart going international. That’s accurate but incomplete.
What Instacart actually already had: Storefront Pro — a white label e-commerce and fulfillment platform serving 380+ grocery banners, already making its first international deployments with Costco Spain and France earlier this year.
What’s different about InstaLeap: Storefront Pro is built for retailers plugging into Instacart’s infrastructure — Instacart shoppers, Instacart fleet, the marketplace’s gravity. InstaLeap is built for retailers running their own stores, their own delivery, and orchestrating across third-party marketplaces. That’s the operational reality for international grocers, particularly in the dense urban markets of Europe and Latin America where retailers keep all of their own infrastructure. It’s almost required.
So this isn’t a gap fill on capability. It’s a gap fill on operational fit for a different kind of retailer.
The 100 retailer relationships are the actual asset — years-long enterprise contracts in markets where Instacart’s footprint is essentially zero. InstaLeap operates as a wholly owned subsidiary for continuity, with Instacart rolling its own products (e-commerce, connected stores, retail media, AI, data) into the InstaLeap retailer base over an estimated 18-24 month integration window.
Instacart’s M&A cadence tells the story of a company systematically assembling pieces: Caper AI and Food Storm in 2021, Eversight and Rosie in 2022, Shive AI in 2024, Windshop in 2025, InstaLeap in 2026. Each one adds a layer.
Props to Quad Jiwan, Head of Corp Dev at Instacart — this is his third deal as Head of M&A. Kimberly Baird at M&A Maximizer led post-merger integration. GP Bullhound ran sell-side out of their Spain office — a London-headquartered tech bank, not a Latin American firm, which signals InstaLeap was marketed as a global software asset and priced off international tech comps.
🚨 The Tease
Water cooler conversations at Possible are pointing to a major deal announcement in the next two weeks.
A strategic buyer nobody has been talking about. Going after independent agencies. Specifically those with significant media underspend.
Christian’s guesses — KKR, Apollo — have already been shot down by people who know. So we genuinely don’t know who it is yet.
Ayelet may have something. She’s confirming first.
We’re on the story. Stay close.
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