Recharge, a Santa Monica company whose software runs subscription programmes for online brands, said on 30 April 2026 that Skio, one of its main competitors among Shopify merchants, was joining the company.
The press release did not disclose terms. Skio founder Kennan Frost then wrote on X, LinkedIn and Instagram that the company had sold for $105 million in cash after raising $8 million from investors, TechCrunch reported. The Next Web said the deal closed the same day and that the price came to roughly 13 times the capital Skio had raised.
The two companies said that together they serve more than 20,000 merchants and process more than $20 billion in gross merchandise volume a year. They did not detail changes to products or teams, saying joint offerings would follow in the coming months.
What Skio built
Skio sells subscription software to brands that run their stores on Shopify, handling recurring orders and the customer portal where shoppers manage them. The press release described it as known for fast product changes and a focus on user experience, which won it a loyal following among fast-growing Shopify brands.
At the time of the sale Skio had $32 million in annual recurring revenue and had processed about $4 billion in payments, according to TechCrunch and The Next Web. Frost had previously said the company reached $10 million in recurring revenue and profitability within three years.
The company grew without paid marketing. Chief executive Aidan Thibodeaux wrote that Skio spent nothing on marketing, advertising or a sales team, and that he and chief technology officer Andrew Chen took every sales call themselves, TechCrunch reported.
“Both companies had a path forward independently. We chose a bigger one.”
Why Recharge is buying
Recharge has spent more than a decade building subscription infrastructure and says it draws on data from more than 100 million shoppers. Co-founder and chief executive Oisin O'Connor said both companies could have carried on alone but chose a larger path, and that the deal combines two of the biggest datasets in subscription commerce.
The companies said the combination would push subscription platforms from shipping features toward delivering results for merchants, and would move customer management away from self-service portals toward conversational, real-time interactions.
Thibodeaux said the partnership gives Skio the data and scale to see what is working across the whole ecosystem, which he said would lead to more deliberate product decisions and more proactive support.
The founder and the funding
Frost, who describes himself as a college dropout, founded Skio on his own after leaving an engineering job at Pinterest, about two weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic took hold. He went through Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch; he wrote that he failed during the batch before pivoting to subscriptions, and that a later team turned the early traction into a real company.
Frost had not run Skio for about two years before the sale, according to TechCrunch. Thibodeaux, the company's first chief operating officer, took over as chief executive, while Frost kept a role as board chair and moved on to Icon, a startup whose AdMaker product generates ads and tracks campaigns.
Y Combinator and Nicolas Wittenborn, founder of the venture firm Adjacent, were among Skio's investors and shared Frost's posts about the sale. The company did not publish details of individual funding rounds.
Consolidation in Shopify subscriptions
The deal brings together two of the best-known subscription apps in the Shopify ecosystem, with Recharge the larger of the two. The Next Web noted that, by the standards of enterprise software acquisitions, it is a small transaction.
For Skio's early backers, however, the outcome is notable because of how little capital the company used. A cash sale of $105 million on $8 million raised meant the company was bought for about three times its annual recurring revenue.
