Skio, a Y Combinator Alumni 2020 which was founded by Kennan Frost, a self-described college dropout, was bought by its competitor Recharge, the companies announced THURSDAY.
Both Skio and Recharge make products that manage subscription payments for brands.
Although the official press release did not disclose the terms of the deal, Frost (who had already left the company) posted on X, LinkedIn, and Instagram that his startup had walked with $105 million in cash and had only raised $8 million from investors. This is a healthy return in every way.
His posts about the deal were republished by Skio Investors Y Combinator And Nicolas Wittenbornfounder of venture capital firm Adjacent.
Frost hadn’t led the company for about two years, according to a LinkedIn post by current Skio CEO Aidan Thibodeaux, who started as the startup’s first COO. When he took office, he described a job that involved no spending on marketing, advertising or a sales team. Instead, they focused their spending exclusively on creating the product. Him and the foundation Technical Director, Andrew Chenmade every sales call themselves, he wrote.
Frost’s story is even more moving. In his Instagram post, he wrote that he founded the startup solo after having a panic attack that caused him to quit his job as an engineer at Pinterest. COVID brought the world to a standstill two weeks later.
Frost got into YC and said in another post that he “completely failed during the batch”, until he turned to this subscription idea. In three years, he helped the company reach $10 million in ARR and, he says, become profitable. Then another “team came together and turned that first traction into a real business,” he credits.
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His YC advisor, Gustaf Alströmer, confirmed the terms of X’s sale. Alströmer described how the founder struggled during his tenure 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 an idea, rotated during the batch, then rotated again. I never gave up. The last pivot worked. Today, Skio sold for $105 million in cash.
There are very few straight lines for… https://t.co/oFm5nYF10F-Gustaf Alströmer (@gustaf) April 30, 2026
Frost says that at the time of the sale, the company had an ARR of $32 million and had processed $4 billion in payments. He is now working on another startup he founded, Iconwhich offers a product called AdMaker for generating ads and tracking ad campaigns.
Frost, Recharge and Wittenborn could not immediately be reached for comment.
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