Steven Bartlett and Authentic Aim to Deploy Up to $400 Million Into Creator Businesses

Steven Bartlett's holding company, Steven.com, and Authentic Brands Group unveiled OBSN — short for Obsession — on Monday in New York. The pitch is a single partner for creator-led businesses: capital, media infrastructure, and global brand build-out under one roof.

The money line is explicit and still soft at the edges. Bartlett said the partners are "aiming to deploy up to $400m in creator businesses over the coming years," with OBSN "at the heart of that strategy," according to Retail Gazette's write-up of the launch quotes. Business Insider's Lucia Moses, who reported the unveiling the same day, likewise framed the commitment as up to $400 million. Neither outlet was given a headcount of creators to be funded or a year-by-year drawdown. Treat the figure as an announced ceiling over a multiyear window, not capital already wired.

The operating split is clearer than the timetable. Steven.com is to run OBSN's media, technology, data, and audience-growth side. Authentic — whose portfolio includes Reebok, Sports Illustrated, and other licensed IP — is to lead brand building, product, licensing, strategic partnerships, and global distribution. Authentic president and CEO Matt Maddox cast the deal as a way to "identify, invest in and scale creator-led IP" and to "strategically deploy hundreds of millions of dollars across the creator economy," again via Retail Gazette.

That framing answers a real procurement problem creators already know: different vendors for clipping, management, merch, and licensing, each optimizing for their own fee. Bartlett called the pattern "fragmentation vultures" onstage, per BI, and asked whether a "truly integrated partner" was possible. Offstage, he told BI he wants creators in evergreen categories who score on resilience and ambition — "creators as founders," running multi-hyphenated businesses rather than rate-card posts.

OBSN is not only a checkbook. The companies describe a live creator-economy media layer — news, analysis, live experiences — already operating with more than one million Instagram followers, per the Retail Gazette account of the announcement. The debut event on 14 September featured a fireside with Bartlett and Authentic executive chairman Jamie Salter, moderated by Hot Smart Rich founder Maggie Sellers Reum. BI notes Bartlett's FlightStory has already put seven figures into Reum as a test case of the same playbook (pre-show research, social clipping, speakers, distribution). FlightStory itself, BI reports, has about 150 employees and took in around $47 million in revenue last year, and recently raised an eight-figure round — color on the operator, separate from the OBSN $400 million ceiling.

What the announcement does not settle: ownership terms on creator IP, exclusivity, service fees versus equity, or how Authentic's licensing machine prices a living creator versus a dead celebrity catalog. Until term sheets surface, the commercial read is the structure itself. A podcast company that already monetizes audience and an IP conglomerate that already monetizes brands are pooling a large, multiyear deployment budget and selling integration as the product. The $400 million is the headline. The unresolved contract is the story that comes next.