Skio raises $3.7M to help brands on Shopify sell subscriptions
- ByStartupStory | December 24, 2021
Skio, a startup that aims to take the pain out of selling subscriptions for brands on Shopify, has raised $3.7 million in a seed funding round. Kennan Davison, an engineer who previously worked at Hulu and Pinterest, founded the startup in April.
He describes Skio as a fintech and an infrastructure company as a pivot from a previous idea that had gone through Y Combinator. Skio is taking on incumbents like ReCharge Payments, which too has built subscription software for e-commerce brands and was valued at $2.1 billion earlier this year after a $227 million raise.
The New York-based startup helps Shopify brands sell subs by managing and scheduling payments as well as anything consumer-facing around the process, such as building a customer portal to manage subscriptions and SMS subscription management, among other things. It claims to use modern frameworks that allow it to “build much quicker” than existing offerings.
“With this quicker building, we’re able to do better than current solutions with one-click checkout with Shop Pay, which increases conversions; passwordless login, which reduces customer tickets; 10x faster subscription editing; a ready-to-go headless subscription portal that leads to instant loads; group subscription discounts, and an easy migration from ReCharge,” Davison said.
Skio must be doing something right. Already, it has a number of customers, including Bev, MatchaBar, Remedy Organics, Quokka Brew, Muddy Bites, Barukas, Simulate, Red Bay, Dandelion Chocolate, Siete Foods, Doe Lashes, and Backbone. “We started at the bottom of the market with smaller Shopify merchants,” Davison told TechCrunch. “Now we’re migrating bigger customers from ReCharge.”
The entrepreneur’s experience with subscriptions goes back to high school, where he said he started skipping class to do web development for a subscription box startup called Conscious Box. After that, he worked as an engineer at Hulu, where he built an app for managing subscription discounts. He then was a growth engineer at Pinterest, where he says he ran more than 200 A/B tests around increasing user conversions.
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