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 college dropout Kennan Frost, has been acquired by competitor Recharge, the companies announced on Thursday. Both Skio and Recharge make products that handle subscription payments for brands. While the official press release did not disclose the terms of the deal, Frost (who had previously left the company), posted on X, LinkedIn, and Instagram that his startup walked with $105 million cash and had only raised $8 million from investors.

That’s a healthy return by any measure. His posts about the deal were reposted by Skio investors Y Combinator and Nicolas Wittenborn, founder of VC firm Adjacent. Frost had not been running the company for about two years, according to a LinkedIn post by Skio’s current CEO, Aidan Thibodeaux, who began as the startup’s first COO.

When he took over, he described a grind that involved no spend on marketing, ads, or a sales team. Instead, they focused spending exclusively on building the product. He and the founding CTO Andrew Chen made every sales call themselves, he wrote.

Frost’s story is even more stirring. In his Instagram post, he wrote that he solo-founded the startup after having a panic attack that caused him to leave his job as an engineer at Pinterest. COVID shut the world down two weeks later.

Skio just sold for $105M cash at close on $8M raised. com/bOosv1wToX Frost got into YC and says in another post that he “completely failed during the batch,” until he pivoted to this subscription idea. In three years, he got the company to $10M in ARR and, he says, profitable.

Then another “team came together and turned this early traction into a real company,” he credits. His YC advisor, Gustaf Alströmer, confirmed the terms of the sale on X. Alströmer described how the founder struggled during his time at the accelerator but never gave up.

Being a founder is hard. Being a solo founder is much harder. Kennan did YC in S20 with Skio.

Applied with one idea, pivoted during the batch, then pivoted again. Never gave up. The last pivot worked.

co/oFm5nYF10F Frost says at the time of the sale the company was at $32 million ARR and had processed $4 billion in payments. He’s is now working on another startup he founded, Icon, which offers a product called AdMaker for generating ads and tracking ad campaigns. Frost, Recharge, and Wittenborn could not be immediately reached for comment.