Fourteen deals worth mentioning in a single week, and those are just the ones that were announced. We know of a few others that haven’t been announced yet. Call it a 20-deal week.
Our working theory, in jest: everyone held their announcements for the week before Cannes. Whatever the reason, the activity is telling us lower-middle market M&A is on fire! Here’s the full rundown, with a little insider knowledge on our headline deal of the week.
Market Update: Bluebird Group x Bertram Capital
Bluebird Group, a Minneapolis-based full-service omnichannel retail and services business that manages retail media, sales management for brands, social commerce across major retail channels announced a partnership with Bertram Capital, announced June 16th. Terms undisclosed, but we understand the trade was in the 14-15x multiple of EBITDA range.
Bertram is a San Mateo PE firm founded in 2006 with about $4B in AUM. They’re a classic buy-and-build platform investor, and they run an in-house tech team called Bertram Labs, the kind of specialized COE that lets a sponsor bring bigger guns to an operating team in support of tech innovation. Bluebird is Bertram’s fifth platform investment out of Fund V, a $1.6B control-focused 2023 vintage fund. PitchBook currently reports that fund’s IRR at 43%.
The fund size tells you something about the deal. It wasn’t a $1.6B deal, and probably not a $500M one either, that would be a large bite for this fund. A reasonable estimate is somewhere in the $400M range.
The structure is a recapitalization, with the founders rolling equity alongside Bertram. Founder and CEO Jason Kapsner cited continued expansion and enhancing Bluebird’s technology platform as the rationale. H.I.G., the Miami-based minority investor that came in during 2021 and helped with tuck-ins, is exiting via the recap. So, this is a sponsor-to-sponsor trade in commerce services.
Bluebird is a deeply relationship-driven business, a direct competitor to Harvest Group and downstream competitor to Acosta with relationships at Target, Best Buy, Costco, among other retailers. That human-relationship core makes it hard to disintermediate with AI, which is critical investor question these days and part of what makes it an attractive, defensible asset. Advisors: Canaccord (Sanjay and team) on the sell side, BrightTower (Juan Mejia) on the buy side.
The Deep Dive: Residence Acquires GateMaker
This week’s longer look is a deal Ayelet’s team advised on the sell side — and it says a lot about how agency roll-ups are being built right now.
On June 15th, Residence, a global network of creative companies based in LA and backed by Gemspring, added GateMaker, a creator and influencer marketing agency. GateMaker is LA-based, founded in 2021 by Ashton Wall and Amelia Sohu. Female-owned, female-led, and deeply embedded in the creator world long before it became fashionable, the founders previously worked with brands like Kylie Cosmetics. GateMaker’s roster is a blue-chip beauty and CPG lineup: Estée Lauder, Glossier, Milk Makeup, and Starbucks.
The stated rationale: it brings proven creator economy expertise into Residence’s network, while GateMaker keeps its brand and leadership.
Was this another creator deal, à la Accenture x Whalar Agency?
Coming on the heels of that deal, the obvious question is whether Residence already had a creator arm. They didn’t. Residence is creative at its core, design, animation, social, native creative, digital strategy, experiential, but they lacked a true creator and influencer specialty. This was a genuine capability buy.
The strategic read:
This is Residence’s second acquisition in under 5 months; they added a social agency in late January, and now GateMaker. That makes them a network of 9 agencies. Both acquisitions follow the Gemspring capital injection into Residence in June 2025. So in a single year: capital in, social agency in January, GateMaker in June.
It’s a more planned, thesis-driven version of what we’ve seen from the likes of Podean doing fast, but deliberate M&A. Residence came in with a clear thesis about what they wanted, and they’re executing it. They are now an active acquirer in this space, and we’ll see more from them.
The “anti-holdco” framing:
Some have called this model the “anti-holdco” play, founder-led independents brought in, keeping their brand and leadership, sharing back office and capital, rather than being absorbed into a monolith. Ayelet’s view is that it fits the wave of creator and social-native expertise getting consolidated right now, and that GateMaker commanded a premium precisely because paid social, influencer work, and those relationships remain very human-driven and highly necessary. As GateMaker’s founders have always said, the world hadn’t quite caught up in 2021 to how important that capability would become. Now it has.
Christian’s is skeptical of the “anti-holdco” label. What’s really happening is a cross-industry pattern. You build an agency, you pour value into the brand, and that brand means something to clients and founders alike. So acquirers increasingly favor a “do no harm” integration style; letting brands live on over a time horizon before folding them in on a timeframe. It’s fundamentally a PMI (post-merger integration) play that makes the process easier on people-heavy businesses.
Advisors: Palazzo (Eric Neihaus) and Speed M&A on the sell side, with Ayelet’s team. Residence didn’t disclose a buy-side advisor — and notably, the deal was driven heavily by Residence’s CEO Ryan, whose vision for where the world is going and how he wants to lead the network was a central part of the transaction.
The Quick Hits: Twelve More Deals
A genuinely remarkable week of activity. Rapid-fire:
Front Row Group acquires Carbon Beauty: The Amazon e-commerce accelerator deepens its bet on the beauty category and its ability to grow brands on Amazon. Second deal this year after Socium; no bankers on this deal given Carbon is about 10 people.
Mazarine Group acquires Bacchus: The luxury PR firm adds PR and client engagement capability plus access to an ultra-high-net-worth network into Mazarine’s creative and experiential group. Terms undisclosed.
Huge acquires Rotate: Making composable commerce a core capability inside Huge’s AI-native design and technology practice. No terms.
Motion Agency acquires LKHN&S: Deepens the Chicago-based independent’s B2B advertising and video capabilities. Terms undisclosed. Founder Kim Everl is now at seven acquisitions — and notably, she doesn’t run a formal M&A search process; the deals come to her, and she knows exactly what she’s doing. B2B remains a great category.
Akeneo acquires Pricing HUB: Extends Akeneo’s product cloud into AI-driven pricing, putting product data and pricing in one decision layer. Akeneo is the PIM (product information management) platform founded by the Magento alumni — long the default PIM for commerce. Most people think of PIM extensions as digital shelf analytics or feed management, so the move into pricing is a genuinely interesting expansion.
Other deals announced the last week or so:
Mile Marker acquires Lift Agency (June 10th) NYC media agency adds a performance content and direct mail shop.
Factual acquires Intelsio: The AI performance marketing platform adds affiliate and lead-gen capability. Factual is a serial acquirer, always on the hunt.
Everything Branding acquires Darlington Marketing Company: San Diego PR and performance shop deep in the food, grocery, and restaurant vertical.
2X acquires Knownwell (June 10th) The massive B2B serial acquirer merges with an agentic AI platform in a deal valuing the combined company at $400M — the week’s only disclosed number, and a useful data point on deal size.
Scorpion acquires 1SEO Digital (June 18th) The local business marketing platform (law firms, home services) buys a Philly digital agency from its PE owner. Terms undisclosed.
Fourteen deals in a week. One disclosed price.
That’s the lower middle market buying capability and keeping the price tag firmly in the drawer. The activity is relentless, the categories are concentrated in creator, beauty, B2B, and commerce, and the “do no harm” integration model is becoming the default for people-heavy businesses.
If you missed it, we just dropped Ayelet’s interview with Erik Huberman (Episode 71, recorded at Possible) and stay tuned, because we’re following this episode with a special edition featuring Chris Erwin of RockWater on the Accenture x Whalar deal.
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Connect with Christian and Ayelet
Ayelet’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayelet-shipley-b16330149/
Christian’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hassold/
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