Blood in the Streets, Screens in the Dark

Here's the finance-guy adage I keep taped to the inside of my skull: when there's blood in the street, buy property. This week's Deal Room is about a lot of blood, and a lot of newly available property.

The blood belongs to Stratacache, for years one of the true heavyweights of digital signage. At its peak the company employed roughly 1,200 people and ran more than 2.5 million devices across 30 offices worldwide. In 2026 it started coming apart. The company has been selling off the pieces and winding down subsidiaries, and the tape tells the story. It sold Scala, its content-management crown jewel (1,000-plus brand customers, 100-plus partners), to Sweden's Vertiseit for SEK 265 million, roughly $28 million. It sold its 35,000 square meter Trotwood headquarters for $18 million. And on May 14 it put Stratacache UK and PRN Retail Media into liquidation, leaving retail media networks behind names like Currys and Iceland with hundreds of screens at risk of going dark.

Now the disclosure, and I'll give it to you straight, b/c this section only works if I do. Branded has a portfolio company squarely in this fight: Vistify, an AI-powered, cloud-based digital signage and "software-defined menu platform" purpose-built for multi-unit and Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) brands.

So yes, I have a dog in this race, and yes, I'm about to tell you why I think it wins.

Here's the mechanics of why a collapse like this is a genuine gold rush, and it's a lesson every operator should internalize. When you run digital signage or digital menu boards, you don't own the thing running your screens. You rent it. You are renting software from a landlord, and the switching costs (re-platforming, retraining, reintegrating your POS) are exactly what keep you from leaving even when you're unhappy. Those switching costs are a moat, right up until the landlord walks out. Then the moat flips. The very friction that locked customers in now forces them out, all at once, on somebody else's timeline. A screen that goes dark isn't a nuisance. In a QSR it's your menu, your pricing, your upsell, your revenue, gone black at the drive-thru and the counter.

That is the property now for sale, and it's why the competitors are circling. Vertiseit bought Scala to scoop up its book. Others are chasing the orphaned accounts. This is a land grab, and it will make winners of a lot of Stratacache's rivals. Think of it like the taxi medallion that owned you until the day it didn't. The instant a captive customer is forced to choose again, loyalty resets to zero, and everybody's suddenly available.

But here's where I plant my (biased) flag. The wrong move for a stranded operator is to panic and swap like for like, trading one "good enough" box for another. Good enough is no longer good enough, b/c good enough is precisely the thing that just went away. This is a rare, forced chance to level up, and it lands right on this week's theme: pick shit that actually works. Vistify built the better mousetrap. It runs on the hardware you already own (Samsung Tizen, LG WebOS, no rip-and-replace), syncs pricing to your POS in under 30 seconds across Toast, PAR, Square, Oracle, Olo and more, pushes a menu change to thousands of locations in minutes instead of a two to three week vendor ticket, and gives you real observability into what's live on every screen right now. That's not a dashboard for decoration. That's the valve.

So am I being opportunistic, featuring my own portfolio company b/c there are deals to be made on the back of a competitor's collapse? Sure. Absolutely.

Am I apologetic about it? Not even a little.

Here's why I can say that with a clear conscience: the real winner here isn't Vistify, and it isn't Vertiseit, and it isn't whoever picks the Stratacache carcass cleanest. The real winner is the operator who treats a forced change as a free upgrade, and comes out the other side with a signage platform that's genuinely better than the one they lost.

When there's blood in the street, the smart money doesn't just buy property. It buys the best building on the block.

If you’re interested in exploring opportunities with Vistify, please click here or contact me directly.