Whalar Pays $20M for Business of Creativity // Also Gets $400M Valuation and Fox Corp Investment
RockWater Roundup
M&A analysis of the creator economy to make you a better operator and investor.
Today we discuss Whalar’s $20M acquisition of Business of Creativity. We discuss deal details, strategic rationale, Whalar’s recent $400M valuation and implied revenue and EBITDA multiples, and investment from Fox into one of its business lines.
Let’s break it down…
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–TARGET: Business of Creativity–
Overview
- Creative agency providing courses, events, thought leadership, and consulting services
- Founded in 2022 by Sir John Hegarty, Ben Lee, Immy Groome
- 7 associated members on LinkedIn
- HQ’d in London
Origin Story
- Started as a course to help develop creative thinking for business leaders and marketers
- Cofounder Sir John Hegarty founded Saatchi & Saatchi and BBH, is a Whalar seed investor, and has been Whalar Chairman since 2017
Company Highlights
- Serves clients such as Barclays, Bayer, Disney, Fiverr, HSBC, Lego, Publicis
Business Lines
- Courses: currently offers three courses on advertising & creativity with two more coming this year
- Community: hosts events worldwide for executives in creative industries
- Consulting: offers services such as brand audits, strategic counsel, and creative training
Capital Markets History
- May 2025 – Acquired by Whalar for $20M
–BUYER: Whalar Group–
Overview
- Global creator-focused agency and media company
- “Helps creators, brands, and platforms work better together”
- Mission: “liberate the creative voice”
- Founded 2016 by Neil Waller and James Street
- Started as IM company after winning entrepreneurship contest
- Clients include Amazon, Estée Lauder, Google, PetSmart, Spotify, S.C. Johnson
- 260 associated members on LinkedIn across New York, London, Berlin
Company Highlights
- AdAge 2025 A-List Social/Influencer Agency of the Year
- AdWeek 2025 Social/Creator Agency of the Year
- Campaign 2024 UK Social Media Agency of the Year
Business Lines
- Sixteenth – 360 talent management
- The Lighthouse – campus for creators and teams
- Foam – operating system for managing digital talent
- Moby Ventures – creator economy focused venture studio
- Umi Games – video game studio
Capital Markets History
- Jun 2025: Portfolio co The Lighthouse raised funding from Fox Corp
- May 2025: Raised funding at a $400M valuation from Marc Benioff (Salesforce CEO), Shopify, and Neal Moritz (Fast & Furious producer)
- 2021: Acquired C-Talent Agency, which represented and employed individuals with disabilities
- 2016-2017: Raised $5M, and all profits have been reinvested since then
–DEAL DETAILS–
Overview
- Announced 5.28.25
- $20M of total consideration
- 100% acquisition of business
- Mix of cash and equity
Post-Deal Operations
- Business of Creativity becomes seventh company in Whalar’s ecosystem
- Founding team to remain with Business of Creativity following acquisition
Strategic Rationale
- Provides Business of Creativity with a larger platform to sell courses and consulting services, leveraging Whalar’s executive network and client connections
- Provides more instruction and exec networking opportunities for creator clients of The Lighthouse, a creator campus and studio owned by Whalar. Per Business Insider: “Lee pointed to a recent example of an event Whalar Group and Business of Creativity hosted at Whalar Group’s Los Angeles-based creator hub, The Lighthouse, where chief marketing officers and creators got together.”
–WHAT ELSE I FIND INTERESTING–
Is the underlying deal rationale different than what the trades report?
BoC cofounder Sir John Hegarty was one of the earliest angel investors into Whalar, and has been Chairman of the company since 2017. Now, Hegarty is bringing his new venture under the Whalar umbrella.
I’m a bit surprised by the deal.
The strategic alignment isn’t as clear to me as Whalar buying talent rep firm Sixteenth (our analysis here), or launching new creator-focused ventures like The Lighthouse (our analysis) and Foam.
But here’s another way of looking at it…
Knowing that there’s a meaningful stock component of deal, and considering the $20M purchase price and $400M recent Whalar valuation, one could posit that the deal is a way to give Sir John Hegarty and his 2 BoC cofounders a combined 5% stake in Whalar as incentive to join Whalar’s executive leadership, buld upon services that the BoC cofounders were already providing and charging Whalar for, and continue building a much bigger business together. For exanple, we know from Whalar’s public filings back in 2023, under related party transactions, that Hegarty provided a “business of creativity” course and charged $21k of fees to Whalar via another company of his, The Garage Entertainment.
Perhaps there’s also an earnout with various revenue targets to achieve the full $20M, though I doubt that; my gut is that this was a quick and simple deal.
A reminder that this is all speculation, since deal details were not disclosed. But if what I’m proposing is the real underlying deal rationale, I kinda get it. Whatever Whalar and Sir Joan Hegarty have been doing, is definitely working to draw investment from high profile investors, make a ton of industry headlines, and grab a bunch of industry awards.
Makes me think what Whalar’s business fundamentals are. On that point…
Whalar has publicly reported financials up to 2023, due to the UK’s corporate transparency laws.
2023 was a tough year for the company (and many industry peers) due to the slowdown in advertising, entertainment, and the Hollywood strikes that lasted for 5 months.
Specifically for 2023, Whalar did $102M in revenue, down $10M from $112M in 2022, and up from $69M in 2021. For 2023, Whalar had an operating loss of $9.1M, down from a profit of $11.5M in 2022 and a profit of $9.3M in 2021. Of note, company financials were not public for 2024, likely due to the fact that they newly registered their business in the US.
For 2024, my understanding is that Whalar, like many other companies in the space, saw revenue growth return to the business, and that leadership put in new cost controls and a focus on margins to ensure go-forward profitability. Also, there was likely a large team and OPEX investment in 2023 related to building out the new business lines (the details can be found in their financial statements). Further, based on the recent 2025 investment valuing the business at $400M, my guess (and hope) is that the current financial picture is very different from prior years.
But let’s play out the numbers a bit…
Assume the company grew revenue 40% from 2023 to 2024, which would be an incredible feat. That would put 2024 revenues at around $140M. As a benchmark, Influential, one of the fastest-growing IM companies in the space, grew revenues 50% YoY, from $100M to $150M, before the acquisition by Publicis (our deal and valuation analysis). Of note, Whalar has multiple other business lines other than IM, that I wouldn’t expect to grow as quickly as IM services.
Let’s also assume Whalar Group overall has an EBITDA margin of 15%, which is likely on the higher end based on (1) it’s bouncing back from a $9.1M loss in 2023, or -9% margin (2) 2022 operating profit, its best year prior, was at a 10% margin and (3) the company has been investing in the growth of multiple new business lines like The Lighthouse, Foam, and talent management. As a benchmark, we estimated Influential’s EBITDA margin at 23%.
Therefore, the implied EBITDA for Whalar is $32M ($140M x 23%).
At a $400M valuation, the implied LTM revenue multiple is 2.9x ($400M / $140M) and LTM EBITDA multiple is 12.5x ($400M / $32M). These are on the higher end of valuation multiples based on the other deals we’re seeing in market. Of note, we estimated Publicis bought Influential for around 14.6x LTM EBITDA (including the earnout).
I’d love to know the actuals here. Again, this is all speculation.
Perhaps the growth and margin story since 2023 is better than my assumptions. Perhaps there’s a lot of booked and expected future growth, and so on a forward 2025 basis, the valuation multiples are below my estimate. Or, the opposite is true, making my multiples estimate quite conservative.
Whalar wants to be at the center of all things creator economy. Is that the right bet?
Whalar has been investing in various creator-focused services to be a go-to company for all the needs of modern creators, talent reps, and brands. For example, The Lighthouse serves as a gathering point, studio, and networking hub for creator professionals. Further, platforms like Foam (Whalar’s proprietary OS for managing creator relationships and campaigns) and investments like Moby Ventures (a creator-economy-focused venture studio) show that Whalar is building between content, commerce, community, and capital. With the acquisition of Business of Creativity, Whalar now adds education and strategic counsel to this stack.
The key will be figuring out how all these businesses, with their different business models and client stakeholders, can collaborate to drive mutual growth and cost synergies. Or, if Whalar’s collective bet is too broad a focus. It feels like Whalar is building a modern UTA or CAA, but we’ve rarely seen a company collectively do talent services, live experiences, venture, and technology well – usually one of the core business lines generate outsized performance relative to the other business lines, and the company’s “tangential bets” get terminated over time to double down on the core.
This also makes me think of Candle Media, who’s co-CEO Kevin Mayer just said that Candle was intended to be an integrated operating company after acquiring mutiple media co’s and brands, but has ended up being “three independent companies now that are operating in different ways…” The pivot meaningfully changes Candle’s exit profile and ROI potential (I’ll leave a deep dive there to another newsletter).
It will thus be important to see which businesses within Whalar holdco deliver the best financial results, and have the greatest growth potential. Over the next 2 years, we expect a learning period where Whalar leadership can follow the data, identify the strongest performers, and focus resources accordingly. There are many newco’s working to build the modern ecosystem of talent services (just read about all the deals on our blog here), and Hollywood’s largest agencies are actively asking “if we were to start this business again in 2025, would we look very different? If so, let’s rethink everything…”.
That’s definitely the right question to be asking!
Excited to see how this all shakes out.
NOTE: our company is very much rooting for Whalar. Them succeeding would be great for the space – we simply believe it’s important to break down all available market data (since so little exists), identify the pros/cons of existing business models and investments based on market precedent, and raise provoking questions. This allows our community to make more data-based decisions. That way, we better learn how to build companies, and how to better allocate capital.
That is good for our industry!
Fox Advertising just invested in The Lighthouse.
(Below is a cut down of my LinkedIn post here)
This deal marks the legacy media co’s 2nd creator bet in four months.
Fox’s first bet was the acquisition of Red Seat Ventures back in Feb 2025 (our deal analysis). Deal context = Fox was facing an existential crisis AND a big opportunity. Their top talent were leaving at a growing rate. e.g. Piers Morgan, Megn Kelly, Tucker Carlson. And those talent were rapidly building and monetizing modern D2C media brands with the support of the RSV team.
Therefore, the Fox team saw where the future of new talent partnership models and consumer eyeballs were going…and made a bet on the rockstar RSV team (shoutout Balfe brothers).
Now, Fox is investing in The Lighthouse, a “studio and campus” for creators. The deal was done through the Fox Advertising team, with the goal of:
1. Be where modern creators spend time
2. Help develop franchises tied to creators across Fox’ content offerings.
The specific deal rationale and potential synergy between the 2 co’s lacks much specificity based on what’s reported in the trades, but Fox Corporation’s overall bet is clear. They (smartly) want to be in the business of creators. It’ll take them some time and $$ before they figure out their optimal strategy, but that’s ok. A long game is being played. And leaning in now is better than waiting till 2026 or after.
This is all part of a growing trend of MANY new buyer categories entering the creator space.
I think of Salesforce’s CEO investing in Whalar Group, Skybound buying Nine Four, Wonder buying Tastemade, Robinhood buying Chartr, Live Nation buying Timeline…the list goes on.
Like I keep on saying –> 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 𝙞𝙨 𝙖 𝙣𝙚𝙬 𝙜𝙧𝙤𝙬𝙩𝙝 𝙘𝙮𝙘𝙡𝙚 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙘𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙤𝙧 𝙚𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙤𝙢𝙮.
I’m the founder of RockWater Industries. We do M&A and strategy advisory for creator economy and digital agencies. From buy / sell-side M&A and fundraising, to consumer research and go-to-market planning.
DM me on LinkedIn or email me chris @ wearerockwater dot com
