What happens when a music industry veteran (and former FaZe Clan President/COO) teams up with an experienced content creator to launch a company they call a “breakthrough digital talent powerhouse” that is “redefining modern entertainment”?
Well, they’re in the process of finding out.
Zach Katz and Jason Wilhelm launched their company Fixated in 2024. Today, their roster includes top digital creators like the Botez sisters, Sketch, and Zach Justice.
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Last month, Fixated snagged a $50 million investment from Eldridge Ventures, following an earlier $10 million investment from Eldridge in March 2025. Its plan? To use a chunk of that money for what it says are “targeted” mergers and acquisitions.
And it just announced the first of those M&As: It’s acquiring Ellify, a Canada-based digital talent management company that reps nearly 200 creators, including Foltyn, XiaomaNYC, Steak, Nevada, MandJTV, and The Besties.
Ellify’s biggest areas of expertise are Roblox, Minecraft, and Pokémon creators, which Katz says puts it at the center of having “authentic access to younger audiences” where “gaming has become one of the most important cultural verticals in the world.”
Adam Ferguson, Ellify’s co-founder and CEO, added, “After a decade of building Ellify, and being fiercely independent, we have joined Fixated to change the game and build a new kind of creator business, one focused solely on creator success and growth. Joining Fixated was a necessary step to build the platform, resources and infrastructure needed to support creators as real businesses, which is what made Ellify special.”
In light of the acquisition, Tubefilter founder and COO Josh Cohen invited Katz and Wilhelm on his podcast Creator Upload to get a little more context on why Fixated thinks it’s different from the many, many other talent companies in this space.
Does the digital space really need another management company?
Katz’s answer to that question is a bold claim.
“Over the past three years, things have completely changed. Digital has stolen the hearts, minds, eyeballs, dollars of the entire world. It has become the dominant force of entertainment,” he says. “Does it necessarily need another ‘management company’? No. But creators are definitely up to bat in the big leagues, and ultimately everyone who’s come before us is still representing the old version of creators. Creators that had different opportunities and different ambitions. So as the needs of creators have evolved to step into this bigger opportunity, companies like ours can come in and actually meet that evolved need with an evolved value proposition.”
Katz adds that during his time at FaZe Clan, he realized the biggest thing talent representatives were focused (or, dare we say, fixated) on was brand deals. But the talent he was working with only brought in 30% of their revenue from brand deals. The other 70% came from platforms paying them for the content that got them an audience in the first place.
“The only thing the [management] industry was doing was brand deals,” he says. “The conversation went like this: Nice to meet you, I’m your manager, I don’t really understand anything that you do with your content. I don’t understand long-form, I don’t understand short-form, I don’t understand this thing called clipping. Keep figuring that out with your friends, and if you do, I’ll get you a brand deal.”
Katz was shocked. Being in the music industry, he says, had given him higher expectations for management. In that industry, managers who want to be taken seriously need to have at least one of two accomplished skill sets, but “ideally both,” he says.
Those skill sets are:
- “Be able to guide their talent creatively. Not write songs for them, but at the very least let them know who they could be in terms of their identity, who they should be working and collaborating with in order to make the best music.”
- “How to market that music at the highest level, and how to orchestrate that marketing.”
By having Wilhelm as co-founder and President, and having other content-experienced “20, 21, 22-year-olds as a part of the business in a senior-level position,” Fixated fills that creative-support role with people who understand content, how to make it, and why it’s successful, on top of having marketing experience, Wilhelm explains.
“The biggest thing is that the industry has grown and evolved so much. There’s so much platforms now, and every platform has a different algorithm, and there are different ways to be successful on them,” he adds. “In order to be successful on all these platforms, [creators] need a real team around them that can actually speak the language of the platforms. For us, that’s a core of our business.”
As for the Eldridge investment, Katz says the firm believes in Fixated not as a talent representation business, but “an ecosystem that has premium talent at the foundational level.”
“I’m talking about guys and girls that are wildly ambitious and whose magic show, so to speak, is totally different from everyone else’s magic shows,” he says. “We have a full-on content studio with some of the brightest, youngest minds in the business, and over the past 18 months we’ve built out this ecosystem, this virality engine, with 25,000 micro-creators who we can access at any given point to get billions of views per month. So now we’re talking about a verticalized entertainment company where you ultimately have the best talent, the best content, and the widest distribution you can possibly imagine.”
Now Ellify is part of that “ecosystem.”
Wilhelm says Fixated brought Ellify on board (absorbing its team, its talent roster, and its influencer marketing arm) because “they are cut from the same cloth we are.”
“Any person, any group that wants to join our company, first and foremost, they have to care about creators,” he says. “They have to actually want to see creators win at the highest level, and Ellify is literally the epitome of that. They care so much, and that was one of the biggest immediate differences between them and basically everybody else.”
Many people on the Ellify team are former creators, and a lot of team members have worked with Fixated team members previously, he adds. “That made it very synergistic on both sides.”
Fixated already has other acquisitions in the pipeline, Katz and Wilhelm say.
As for what they plan to do with the rest of Eldridge’s investment, Fixated is “accelerating investments across talent representation, content production, distribution, and creator infrastructure, transforming high-performing creators into sustainable, creator-led IP,” the company said in a statement.
We have heard this before. Digital content has shaped up to be the single most formidable competitor for traditional entertainment (just ask Netflix). Businesses in our space have recognized that’s happening, and want to turn creators into Marvel-sized IPs to fill the shoes Hollywood is fumbling. Fixated even says its goal with M&As is to put together “the Avengers” of our space (something we’ve also heard before).
But Fixated’s approach to providing music industry-style creative-support management, where it taps experts to source and guide talent down a path they’ve already walked, could set it apart as more and more outside companies come into the digital world, trying to chase the next big thing.
For more on Fixated’s plans, you can check out the full episode of Creator Upload embedded above, or right here.
