- 617 Collective, a New York holding company that acquires founder-led marketing and creator-economy agencies, has named Victor Martinez, a 20-year Citi and JPMorgan veteran, as Partner and Head of Capital Markets.
- The hire backs a plan to deploy up to $100 million in acquisitions and partnerships this year, building on two deals already closed: creative studio Nominee Design and Miami-based talent agency Zanahoria Azul.
- The move lands amid a broader surge of institutional capital into creator-economy and agency M&A, from Omnicom's $13.5 billion merger with Interpublic to Publicis' and Stagwell's influencer-agency buying sprees.
A former Citi and JPMorgan banker joins a two-deal-old holding company betting that founder-friendly acquisitions can scale like a roll-up without turning into one.
617 Collective Hires a Wall Street Banker to Fund Its Bet Against the Agency Roll-Up Playbook
617 Collective LLC is bringing institutional finance into an industry it has spent the last year positioning itself against. The New York-based acquisition platform, which buys and partners with founder-led agencies across influencer marketing, talent management, PR, and creative services, has named Victor Martinez as Partner and Head of Capital Markets. Martinez spent more than two decades in investment banking at Citi and JPMorgan, where he worked on financing, capital formation, and public-market positioning for technology, media, and consumer companies.
His mandate is specific: build the lender relationships, financing structures, and corporate development pipeline behind 617 Collective's plan to deploy up to $100 million into acquisitions and partnerships this year. That is a notable sum for a firm that publicly announced its first acquisition just five months ago, and it signals that 617 Collective intends to move well beyond the handful of deals that got it noticed.
A Banker's Job in a Business Built on Founders
On paper, the hire looks like a standard executive announcement. In practice, it is a tell about where 617 Collective thinks it needs to compete. Martinez will work directly with banks, lenders, private investment firms, and family offices to build the financing infrastructure a buyer needs to win competitive processes against better-capitalized rivals — the same institutions that back the holding companies and private-equity platforms currently running the largest acquisition programs in marketing services.
That matters because 617 Collective isn't just adding a banker; it's adding one to a leadership bench that, until January, didn't have a dedicated operating executive at all. Cynthia Monroy, a CPA who previously served as CFO at the agency Band of Insiders, joined as Managing Partner in January 2026 to run day-to-day operations and integration across the platform. Martinez's arrival six months later gives the firm an operator and a dealmaker in place at the same time it's asking the market to take its acquisition pipeline seriously.
Two Deals In, and Already Rewriting the Pitch
617 Collective launched in August 2025 as a holding company backed by family offices and private investors, initially hunting for Northeast-based agencies generating $1 million to $5 million in revenue with strong ties to Gen Z and millennial audiences. It has since acquired two agencies that stretch that original footprint: Nominee Design, an Oklahoma-based brand and creative studio founded in 2010, in January 2026, and Zanahoria Azul, a Miami-based influencer talent management agency focused on the U.S. Hispanic and Latin American markets, in April 2026.
Both deals were framed the same way: as proof of a "partner-holdco" model built to look nothing like a traditional agency roll-up. Rather than centralizing operations or integrating acquired teams into a single brand, 617 Collective leaves leadership, culture, and client relationships in place and layers in capital, shared infrastructure, and strategic support. "We built 617 Collective to be the opposite of a roll-up," Monroy said when the Nominee deal closed. Announcing Martinez's hire, she called it another step in "the continued institutionalization of 617 Collective" — an unusually candid admission that founder-friendly positioning and Wall Street-grade financial infrastructure are being built in parallel, not in tension.
Why a Fragmented, Fast-Growing Industry Needs Institutional Money
617 Collective's timing isn't accidental. Estimates of the creator economy's size vary widely by research firm and methodology — recent figures range from roughly $250 billion to more than $320 billion in 2026, with Influencer Marketing Hub pegging the addressable market at $480 billion by 2027 — but nearly every estimate agrees the category is compounding at 20%+ annually and remains structurally fragmented, with thousands of small agencies competing for a shrinking pool of institutional capital.
That fragmentation has turned into deal flow. Quartermast Advisors' 2026 Creator Economy M&A report counted 81 creator-economy transactions in 2025, up 17.4% from 69 the year before, with agencies representing roughly a fifth of all deals behind software businesses. Marketing services M&A rose 14% year-to-date in 2025 even as broader U.S. deal activity declined, according to Capstone Partners, and marketing and communications M&A overall was up 22% year-over-year, per The Drum.
The buyers active in that market set a high bar. Omnicom closed its $13.5 billion merger with Interpublic Group in November 2025, creating a roughly $25 billion-revenue holding company and the largest agency deal in history. Publicis Groupe has spent the past two years assembling its own creator-economy stack, paying around $500 million for the influencer platform Influential in 2024 and acquiring BR Media Group, Latin America's largest influencer agency, in early 2025. Stagwell acquired the AI-driven influencer firm LEADERS, and in January 2025, Later paid $250 million to acquire the affiliate-commerce platform Mavely from Nu Skin Enterprises. Against that backdrop, a firm planning $100 million in deployment needs more than conviction — it needs the same lender relationships and deal-structuring capability the bigger players already have. That's the gap Martinez is there to close.
Permanent Capital Comes for Madison Avenue
617 Collective's "long-term holding" pitch — buy, don't flip; preserve, don't integrate — isn't a new idea so much as a familiar one arriving in a new industry. It echoes the "permanent capital" model that firms like Constellation Software have run in niche software for decades, and the smaller-scale version practiced by Tiny, the Andrew Wilkinson-led holding company that buys profitable internet businesses at modest multiples and leaves founders in charge. What's new is the application to agencies, where the standard playbook has historically involved centralizing back-office functions, standardizing delivery, and exiting to a bigger buyer within three to five years.
Whether that founder-friendly framing survives contact with scale is an open question, and not just for 617 Collective. Ebiquity, the marketing consultancy, has flagged that as holding companies build out influencer and creator capabilities more broadly, brand clients should watch for conflict-of-interest risk, data-sharing exposure across competing accounts, and a shrinking pool of genuinely independent agencies to choose from — concerns that apply to any acquirer accumulating multiple agencies under one roof, regardless of how it brands the structure. A holding company that leaves ten agencies operationally independent today can still end up looking, functionally, like the consolidated network it says it's avoiding once shared services, cross-referrals, and a single capital markets office sit behind all of them.
What's Next
For now, 617 Collective's read on the moment is straightforward: founders in a maturing, capital-hungry industry want scale and infrastructure without giving up the culture and client relationships that make their businesses valuable, and there's a lane for a buyer willing to provide both. Martinez's hire is the clearest evidence yet that the firm intends to compete for that lane with real institutional backing rather than opportunistic, one-off deals.
With $100 million earmarked for deployment this year and a capital-markets operation now in place to source it, 617 Collective's next moves — and how closely its future acquisitions stick to the founder-first script that got it here — are worth watching as 2026's wave of creator-economy consolidation keeps building.
