Skio, the no-sales-team Shopify subscription tool, sells to Recharge for $105M cash

Skio built subscription payments infrastructure for Shopify brands: handling subscription billing, payments, and customer management. Founder Kennan Frost is a self-taught dropout who left his engineering job at Pinterest after a panic attack, and two weeks later the pandemic lockdown began. He founded the company solo, and after entering YC the original direction failed completely; he pivoted within the batch to subscription payments, which only then worked.

The company's most counterintuitive aspect was its growth model: no marketing spend, no advertising, and no sales team, with all money spent on the product. Frost and founding CTO Andrew Chen personally handled every sale. It reached $10M ARR and profitability in three years, and by the time of the 2026 sale it had reached $32M ARR and cumulatively processed $4B in payments; total funding was only $8M.

On April 30, 2026, Recharge, the largest competitor and Shopify subscription leader, announced it would acquire Skio. The official press release did not disclose the amount, but Frost and YC advisor Gustaf Alströmer both confirmed it was $105M in cash. After the merger, the two sides served more than 20,000 brands and $20B in annual GMV. At that time, Frost had already stepped back from day-to-day operations for more than two years; he retained a board seat and moved on to a new company, Icon.