Who Owns Elgato?

The Elgato name traces to Markus Fest, a mathematician who founded Miles Information Systems GmbH in Munich in 1992. The company originally made CD-burning software, including Toast, which was later sold to Roxio. In 2002 the company launched EyeTV, a product that let viewers watch and record television on Mac computers, and in 2003 it renamed itself Elgato Systems, taking the name from the Spanish word for "the cat."

EyeTV made Elgato the de facto leader in Mac television, at one point holding close to 90 percent of the German market for TV tuners on Mac. The company expanded into smart home products under the Eve brand and into video capture devices.

The gaming pivot came in 2012 with Game Capture HD, a device built partly in response to gamers who were hacking EyeTV hardware to record console gameplay. The capture card category proved far larger than TV tuners as Twitch and YouTube gaming video exploded. In 2017 Elgato launched the Stream Deck, a programmable macro keypad that became the defining product for streamers and, later, for productivity users and broadcasters far beyond gaming.

In June 2018, Corsair agreed to acquire Elgato's gaming business for approximately $46.6 million. The deal closed July 2, 2018, with Elgato Systems retaining the Eve smart home line as a separate company. Under Corsair, the Elgato brand expanded from capture cards and the Stream Deck into microphones (Wave), lights (Key Light), cameras (Facecam), mounts, and a full creator ecosystem, plus the Elgato Marketplace for plugins and digital assets.

Through 2025 and 2026, Corsair described Stream Deck as a strategic centerpiece, expanding it from a creator tool into a control layer for productivity, gaming, and sim racing, with the product moving into professional broadcast studios and appearing in environments from home offices to the Olympic Games production workflow.