Y Combinator alum Skio sells for $105M cash, only raised $8M, founder says

Skio, a 2020 Y Combinator alum that was founded by self-described assemblage dropout Kennan Frost, has been acquired by rival Recharge, the companies announced connected Thursday.

Both Skio and Recharge marque products that grip subscription payments for brands.

While the authoritative property merchandise did not disclose the presumption of the deal, Frost (who had antecedently near the company), posted connected X, LinkedIn, and Instagram that his startup walked with $105 cardinal currency and had lone raised $8 cardinal from investors. That’s a steadfast instrumentality by immoderate measure.

His posts astir the woody were reposted by Skio investors Y Combinator and Nicolas Wittenborn, laminitis of VC steadfast Adjacent.

Frost had not been moving the institution for astir 2 years, according to a LinkedIn post by Skio’s existent CEO, Aidan Thibodeaux, who began arsenic the startup’s archetypal COO. When helium took over, helium described a grind that progressive nary walk connected marketing, ads, oregon a income team. Instead, they focused spending exclusively connected gathering the product. He and the founding CTO Andrew Chen made each income telephone themselves, helium wrote.

Frost’s communicative is adjacent much stirring. In his Instagram post, helium wrote that helium solo-founded the startup aft having a panic onslaught that caused him to permission his occupation arsenic an technologist astatine Pinterest. COVID unopen the satellite down 2 weeks later.

Frost got into YC and says successful different station that helium “completely failed during the batch,” until helium pivoted to this subscription idea. In 3 years, helium got the institution to $10M successful ARR and, helium says, profitable. Then different “team came unneurotic and turned this aboriginal traction into a existent company,” helium credits.

His YC advisor, Gustaf Alströmer, confirmed the presumption of the merchantability connected X. Alströmer described however the laminitis struggled during his clip astatine the accelerator but ne'er gave up.

Frost says astatine the clip of the merchantability the institution was astatine $32 cardinal ARR and had processed $4 cardinal successful payments. He’s is present moving connected different startup helium founded, Icon, which offers a merchandise called AdMaker for generating ads and tracking advertisement campaigns.

Frost, Recharge, and Wittenborn could not beryllium instantly reached for comment.