In 2016, Garrett Smith sat in a co-working space in East Austin with a single idea: that the American South deserved a media company that took it seriously. Not the caricature of cowboy boots and country music, but the real South — ambitious, diverse, entrepreneurial, and hungry for editorial content that reflected its complexity. Through his creative holding company, Nalon Creative Group, Smith launched what would become ACE Digital Media Group with a single magazine concept and a conviction that quality could win in a market that had largely abandoned it.

The early years were lean. ACE's first title, a business and culture hybrid aimed at Austin's growing startup community, found its audience slowly. But Smith and co-founder Quincy Bell made a decision early on that would define the company's trajectory: they would never chase clicks. Every editorial decision would be made in service of the reader, not the algorithm. That meant longer reads, deeper reporting, and a design aesthetic that borrowed more from The Atlantic than from BuzzFeed. It also meant slower growth — but the readers who found ACE stayed.

By 2019, ACE had expanded to five titles. By 2022, it had crossed twenty. The strategy was deliberate: rather than compete in a single vertical against entrenched national players, ACE would own multiple verticals simultaneously. Automotive. Lifestyle. Food and drink. Technology. Real estate. Sports. Each title was designed to be the definitive premium voice in its category for the Texas market — and eventually, the broader American South. The multi-vertical approach created a flywheel: editorial talent attracted to one title could contribute across others, advertising relationships scaled across the portfolio, and readers who discovered ACE through one magazine often subscribed to several.

Austin proved to be a strategic masterstroke as a home base. The city offered a fraction of the overhead of New York or Los Angeles while delivering a creative talent pool that had been quietly building for a decade. The tech boom had brought engineers and product managers, but it had also brought designers, photographers, writers, and brand strategists who wanted to work on something with cultural weight. ACE became a destination employer in Austin's creative economy — a place where editorial ambition wasn't a liability.

The company's premium print-plus-digital model also ran against the grain of conventional media wisdom. While competitors were abandoning print as a dying medium, ACE doubled down on it — not as nostalgia, but as a quality signal. A beautifully produced print magazine communicates something that a web page cannot: that someone cared enough to make something permanent. Advertisers noticed. Luxury brands, regional real estate developers, and high-end automotive dealers found in ACE's print titles an environment their competitors couldn't access. The result was a CPM structure that outperformed digital-only competitors by a significant margin.

Today, with 36+ titles across more than 20 editorial verticals and a readership exceeding two million monthly, ACE is preparing for its next chapter. The company's $12M Series A raise — targeted for close in late 2026 — is designed to fund national expansion beyond Texas, accelerate the ACE AI Suite platform, and build out the data and audience intelligence infrastructure that will define the next generation of premium publishing. Smith's original conviction — that quality could win — has proven correct. The question now is how far it can scale.