Most scaled independents looked at Grapevine.ai, a performance-driven content creation platform, during its sale process and didn’t understand it. They didn’t know how to value the technology. They could not buy into the economic model and growth forecasts. You can’t completely fault them for passing on what is fast emerging tech and an economic model than what most scaled agencies are accustomed to running.
One scaled agency, NewEngen, led. by Justin Hayashi got it and leaned in, stepping up on deal terms and eventually closing the acquisition in February. Three months later, Grapevine.ai founder Caroline Levere has beaten her aggressive forecast. The short-form video and micro-influencer tailwinds Justin saw in Zuckerberg’s quarterly earnings calls and tracked in real time during diligence were playing out exactly as predicted.
We sat down with Justin at Possible 2026 in the Unplugged Collective pavilion for a conversation about what makes NewEngen different from its peers, how they think about M&A, and what they’re looking for next acqusition.
The Origin Story We Did Not Expect
NewEngen started in 2016 with a thesis that had nothing to do with being an agency.
Justin came out of Zulily, a high-growth e-commerce company that went through an IPO and a billion-dollar sale to Qurate and started NewEngen with two co-founders and a small amount of venture capital. The original plan: build a bidding algorithm for search and dethrone Marin Software and Kenshoo (now Skai). Technology as the differentiator. Software as the product.
The problems were immediate and instructive. They weren’t technologists - they were marketers. The platforms controlled their destiny: build around a GoogleAds or Facebook API and something changes, and what you built is suddenly obsolete. And clients didn’t actually want software; they wanted strategy, consultation, and the ability to learn from a firm’s broader portfolio of client experience.
So NewEngen pivoted to became an agency. Except they kept calling themselves a SaaS company for years, correcting clients who called them what they obviously were.
Justin tells this story with unusual candor: “We didn’t understand what we were actually building and what our customers wanted and how to actually label that properly.” The tech-enabled DNA survived the pivot. The original software mostly didn’t. What did survive was an iterative, agile capability to go from zero to one quickly — which turned out to be more valuable than anything they’d actually built in 2016.
Three Acquisitions in the Content and Creator Space
From the beginning, NewEngen believed content and creative were essential drivers of performance outcomes. Most agencies say this. NewEngen backed it structurally: their fifth hire was a graphic designer. As a company still identifying as SaaS.
That conviction shaped their M&A strategy. Three of their acquisitions have been in the content and creator space — two in creator/influencer marketing, one in social studios production. The thesis: the outsize performance gains in digital marketing are coming from content quality and creator strategy, not from media buying optimization alone. You can’t separate creative from performance anymore.
The acquisition that most clearly demonstrates this conviction is Grapevine.ai.
The Grapevine.ai Deal: Why NewEngen Won Where Others Walked
Two things made Grapevine.ai hard for most strategic buyers to process.
The first: the economic model. Grapevine.ai originated as MySubscriptionAddiction.com — an affiliate website that still exists, now owned by NewEngen — and transformed into Grapevine.ai over a few years. As a relatively young business still finding its right customer segment, it had a mix of long-tail small contracts ($5-6K/month) alongside larger enterprise relationships. Most scaled independents don’t know what to do with long-tail revenue. It looks messy. It doesn’t fit clean acquisition criteria.
The second: the technology. Grapevine.ai’s edge wasn’t a large influencer network — their roster was approximately 900 creators, not the millions other platforms offer. The edge was what they could do with those creators in terms of driving closed-loop performance outcomes. Deep acumen for how content drives share of wallet within ad accounts. Micro-influencer and UGC strategy aligned with where the social platform algorithms are heading. That capability doesn’t show up cleanly in a spreadsheet.
Justin had conviction in both. The influencer acquisition NewEngen made in 2021 — right after closing a deal with Insignia Capital — gave them exposure to retail marketing, commerce, and CPG that most agencies hadn’t built. Grapevine.ai was the next step: more e-commerce focused, more performance oriented, more closed-loop.
How Justin managed the financial risk:
When NewEngen entered diligence, Grapevine.ai had an aggressive forecast. Caroline expressed strong conviction in a bottoms-up view of how to get there. Justin watched the actual numbers come in over the months between first conversation and close — not just believing the forecast, but tracking whether reality was matching the model in real time.
Two external signals reinforced the conviction: Zuckerberg’s quarterly earnings calls, in which short-form video and Reels time-on-site growth went from approximately 20% to 30% year-over-year across consecutive quarters. And specific technical commentary around algorithm changes — Gemini, Andromeda — that Justin read as signals that micro-influencer and UGC content formats were exactly what the platforms were optimizing for.
The result: Grapevine.ai exceeded their ambitious forecast. Average contract values increased. Client count decreased — in the healthy way that indicates a business shedding the wrong customers and concentrating on the right ones. The margin profile improved.
Integration Philosophy: Do No Harm
NewEngen’s approach to integration is intentional and varies by acquisition. The principle is “do no harm” — a posture their private equity investors at Insignia Capital explicitly aligned on and that NewEngen has fully internalized.
In practice, this has looked different across their acquisition history:
LT Partners (affiliate marketing): Brand went away fast. Team integrated quickly into the broader media services function. The capability was additive, the brand was not distinctive enough to preserve.
Acorn Influence (creator/retail commerce): Took longer to integrate given new capability being brought in. The name Acorn Influence has now been retired — it’s NewEngen’s influencer business.
Donut Digital (social studios): The most instructive case. Donut had built a genuinely distinctive brand — viral short-form content, unhinged creative, multi-million view pieces about culture at Donut. Justin made a deliberate decision not to absorb that into NewEngen’s corporate identity. He renamed it Donut Studios (dropping “Digital” to clarify positioning), migrated NewEngen’s 20-person creative team under the Donut brand, and kept it running with significant operational autonomy. The Donut Studios Instagram and TikTok are intentionally different from anything NewEngen would publish. That’s by design.
The integration lesson Justin shared from a harder experience: get alignment on goalposts before you close. Not just the financial terms — what does the other side look like at 3 months, 6 months, 12 months? What are the key milestones? What would cause you to change course? Having those conversations in detail before the deal closes makes the inevitable surprises more manageable and keeps both sides genuinely eyes-wide-open.
The Buy Box
Justin’s acquisition priorities for what comes next, in order of emphasis:
Social and content. NewEngen is leaning heavily into video-first formats and creative. The tailwinds from platform algorithm evolution and short-form video growth are not slowing. Any business that deepens capability here is in scope.
Measurement and accountability. NewEngen has built this capability organically and it’s a core differentiator. If there’s a business that can advance it further — better attribution, incrementality, closed-loop commerce measurement — they’re very interested.
Commerce and omnichannel. Every NewEngen client is B2C. Full stop — no B2B. Commerce use cases, retail media, omnichannel performance, anything that deepens full-funnel capability for consumer brands.
Size: $3-12M revenue is the current sweet spot. They’ve looked below that range. They wouldn’t go significantly above it right now.
Why NewEngen Is Different
We closed the conversation with a framing worth repeating: NewEngen surprisingly is the software-led agency many others aspire to become. Not because they still run software as a product - they largely moved past the original tech. But because the tech-enabled DNA, the iterative product mentality, the content-first conviction that dates back to their early hires, and the ability to go from zero to one quickly on new capabilities makes them structurally different from independents that grew up as pure services businesses and are now trying to bolt technology onto a legacy operating model.
YCombinator has put a target on agency backs. Justin’s not losing sleep over the YC headline specifically. But he’s very much awake to how AI is going to flow through clients, agencies, and ad tech companies and what that means for the future of work and marketing at scale.
Justin Hayashi is CEO of NewEngen, a tech-enabled performance and creator marketing agency backed by Insignia Capital.
