Article 41, Astrocade & ElevenLabs' AI Trifecta

The Digital Dealflow

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Quartermast Advisors
May 07, 2026

Good Morning,

Not many acquisitions to write about this week, but a lot of fundraising. ElevenLabs closed a third tranche on its $500M Series D at an $11B valuation, as the AI voice and music platform's ARR jumped from $350M at year-end to over $500M in four months.

AI gaming platform Astrocade, a no-code AI-powered platform that allows users to build games raised $56M across Series A and B led by Sequoia. This includes a $10M creator program- offering rewards to creators of popular games.

In sports media, Genius Sports closed its $1.2B acquisition of Legend, the digital sports and gaming media network. DAZN bought ViewLift for roughly $100M, picking up the streaming tech behind NBA, NHL, and MLB regional operations. WPP-owned Ogilvy took a strategic stake in Article 41, the social-first NIL athlete agency.

On the pre-M&A radar, MrBeast is shopping film rights for "Most Dangerous Game," the thriller he co-wrote with James Patterson, before the book hits shelves.

In other news, when did meme-stock CEOs become strategic acquirers and federal trials become creator content? In case you missed it, GameStop's Ryan Cohen lobbed an unsolicited $56B offer at eBay, and Musk v. Altman trial is now streaming live on a 3.6K-subscriber YouTube channel.

Quartermast Creator Economy Index:

Layoff Watch:

  • The Daily Wire: Cut roughly 100 jobs from its Nashville production office in a restructuring shift toward DC, the Northeast, and Florida.

  • Us Weekly: McClatchy's celebrity weekly cut around 20 people, close to half its 50-person workforce, with the entire social media team affected after a soft Q1.

The Weekly Roundup

  1. YouTube's $9.88B Quarter: Alphabet disclosed YouTube hit $9.88B in Q1 2026 ad revenue, up 10.7% year-over-year, while Google Search posted 19% revenue growth on AI-experience usage as creators' videos increasingly feed LLM citations (Alphabet).

  2. Patreon Launches Quips: Patreon rolled out Quips, a short-form post format that surfaces in a new home feed across its 80M-fan, 300K-creator network, alongside Instagram-style Collaboration posts that pair creators on joint posts (Patreon).

  3. Roblox's Adult Pivot: Roblox is hiking its Developer Exchange rate by 42% for "novel games" played by 18-and-up users starting June 8, after CEO David Baszucki flagged 50% YoY adult-user growth and the platform's 20M-DAU dip over the past six months (The Verge).

  4. Big Five Publishers vs. Meta: Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage joined a class action accusing Meta of training its AI on copyrighted books, the largest publisher coalition yet to take the company to court over training-data use (Engadget).

  5. Power Tilts to Platforms: Business Insider reported that the balance of power in influencer marketing is shifting from creators back to platforms as TikTok, YouTube, and Meta consolidate the data, ad inventory, and pricing leverage that talent agencies once held (Business Insider).

  6. Brand Ownership over Sponsorships: Digiday tracked a wave of micro-influencers walking away from one-off sponsorships in favor of equity and ownership in their own brand spinouts (Digiday).

  7. AI Hits the Creator Stack: Digiday's state-of-generative-AI primer maps how creators, agencies, and brands are deploying AI tools across production, distribution, and brand-fit testing as adoption moves from experiment to standard workflow (Digiday).

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