RevenueCat, a company so tied to the mobile economy that now one-in-three new subscription apps launch with its software under the hood, is preparing to expand its business. Capitalizing on its market position, which now includes powering the subscriptions of some 50,000 mobile apps, RevenueCat’s growth plan will focus on using its understanding of the mobile industry to solve more of the common problems that mobile developers face.
After the court’s ruling in the Apple-Epic antitrust battle, the company’s focus includes helping developers determine if it’s the right time to support web-based payments, now that is permitted by Apple’s U.S. App Store guidelines. RevenueCat also offers the tools to do so.
To fuel its growth, RevenueCat has raised $50 million in Series C funding in a round led by existing investor Bain Capital. Returning investors, including Index Ventures, Y Combinator, Adjacent, Volo Ventures,
and SaaStr Fund, also participated.
The funds extend RevenueCat’s earlier $12 million Series C from last year, bringing its total raise to date to $100 million. With the additional capital, the startup is now valued at $500 million, post-money — or “half a corn,” as RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting jokes, making a reference to the billion-dollar companies that became known as “unicorns.”
“With where we’re at, this gives us room to grow… I think we can build a public-scale company,” Eiting tells TechCrunch.
Key to the company’s growth are the next products RevenueCat has on its roadmap.
Having initially concerned itself with making it easier for developers to implement subscriptions without needing to write as much code, RevenueCat’s future involves solving a broader set of problems facing mobile developers.
Eiting compares the next phase of the company’s growth to something like Shopify’s e-commerce platform. Initially, Shopify offered tools to run an online storefront with its subscription-as-a-service offering, but later expanded to be a broader e-commerce business that included things like fulfillment, lending, an app marketplace, and more.
“We know a lot about this industry,” explains Eiting, of the app economy. “There are a ton of commonalities between all these businesses… common problems that go unsolved. We’re in a position to solve those now.”
Specifically, RevenueCat aims to help developers with other aspects of their business beyond billing and subscriptions in areas like customer acquisition (something that became a more challenging problem after Apple’s rollout of anti-tracking technology, or ATT), as well as lending money to apps facing cash flow constraints.
Within its core business, RevenueCat is working to improve point-of-purchase acquisition to help developers turn their customers into paid subscribers. The company also launched new tools like a drag-and-drop paywall editor and new tools for apps offering virtual currencies.
More recently, the company shifted its focus back to web payments, as the Apple-Epic court ruling sparked a flood of interest in RevenueCat’s web billing engine, which launched into beta last fall. The team had been quietly iterating on the product ahead of the court’s decision, which forced Apple to allow in-app links to external purchases without commissions.
Image Credits:RevenueCat
Today, the tool competes with Stripe, Recurly, Chargebee, and others, but is built specifically to meet the needs of mobile app developers.
Currently, just over 2,000 developers are trying out RevenueCat’s billing service.
The company isn’t just providing the tools to help developers adopt the new technology; however, it’s also offering the insights as to whether they should.
By running experiments on a consumer mobile app RevenueCat acquired last year, a spicy audiobooks app called Dipsea, the company can test to see how billing changes impact the app’s bottom line. For example, it might not make sense for small business developers who only pay Apple a 15% commission to try to handle payments on their own, as they also have to take on the risk of handling chargebacks and fraud, which can be expensive.
These tests can provide the industry (and Apple itself, perhaps), with data about what in-app purchases (IAPs) are really worth. It may turn out that the commissions Apple charges wouldn’t even need a big discount down from the standard 30%, depending on what the data indicates.
Image Credits:RevenueCat
“I’m just happy that we can actually do the experiment, because I don’t think Apple’s done it,” Eiting tells TechCrunch. “I’m excited to finally get some data, finally settle the debate — or at least enrich the debate.”
Another area impacting RevenueCat’s business is AI.
In addition to providing payment infrastructure to customers like OpenAI for its ChatGPT app and other AI model providers, RevenueCat is facing an explosion of “vibe-coded” apps — apps built by developers who leveraged AI technology to handle the coding process. Eiting recalls telling a kid at a school’s career day about vibe coding and a month-and-a-half later, the kid shipped a basic app on the App Store.
“The kid can’t program, but in two months built an app,” he says. “When I think about what my journey was to get to that point — his was massively compressed. And that’s going to have effects on the economy in ways we can’t really even understand at the moment.”
This shift in how apps are built could see RevenueCat working with companies that provide AI-powered coding tools.
The new funds will also help RevenueCat build its next products, hire, and fuel merger and acquisition efforts to accelerate growth.
“I think we’ve actually gotten pretty good at building targeted engineering and product teams to go after things. And we want to scale that as much as possible,” Eiting says.
