RevenueCat, a leading subscription management platform for apps monetized through in-app purchases, is now flush with new capital and expanding online. The company has closed a $12 million Series C led by Adjacent after launching a new product, RevenueCat Billing, that enables web app developers to integrate subscription purchases into any website. Later it will also support Roku.
The timing of the product launch is notable as it comes amid the implementation of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulation, which forces Apple to completely re-open the iPhone and the App Store. As a result, Apple initially blocked iPhone web apps (Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs) in the EU, likely fearing that developers would abandon its App Store, before reversing that decision under pressure from regulators.
However, for RevenueCat, the upcoming changes to iOS – not to mention Apple’s refusal to lower its standard 15-30% commission rate – mean that there are now more developers using the Internet to monetize their apps.
“It could be progressive web apps or any type of customer that wants to take payments outside of the app store,” explains Jacob Eiting, CEO of RevenueCat, about the new web invoicing product. “It will play in all the new things [DMA] Rules… it’s going to be a pretty significant product expansion for us,” he said.
The company says it moved in this direction due to incoming interest from developers. Even if they didn’t have a web app, many developers wanted to move their customers online to pay.
Although Stripe already enables this functionality, developers lacked a system specifically designed for consumer subscription apps. Even when developers now process payments through Stripe or others, they receive their data and insights in the same format and dashboard where they already manage their in-app purchase data. This makes it easier for them to focus on how their subscription apps monetize overall, regardless of where the payment comes from – web or mobile.
Although Apple has historically not allowed app developers to direct customers out of their iOS apps and onto the Internet, control is possible through other channels, such as the developer’s website or emails to customers. The EU’s DMA rules should also allow developers to direct customers from their mobile apps to the Internet.
RevenueCat Billing, essentially a web SDK, allows developers to accept subscription payments from any website. It joins other recent product releases such as Paywall, Targeting and Experiments, all designed to help developers increase their revenue. Today, RevenueCat supports subscriptions in over 30,000 apps and processes over $2 billion in subscriptions annually, it says.
Adjacent’s new Series C (led by Nico Wittenborn – a Series A investor, now a board member) totals $12 million. Other investors include Y Combinator, Index Ventures, Volo Ventures and SaaStr Fund. Leading up to this round, RevenueCat had raised $56 million, bringing total raised to over $68 million.
In addition to supporting new products, the fundraiser will help RevenueCat expand into new markets, including Japan and South Korea.
“Our main competition is to ‘cobble together monetization technology ourselves,'” Miguel Carranza, CTO and co-founder of RevenueCat, said in a statement about the fundraising and expansions. “In the US, we have done a good job educating developers, product people, marketers and CEOs about the challenges of building in-house. Unfortunately, in many other regions, it is still common for companies to pour valuable resources into something that offers no differentiation or value to the company’s end users. We are investing in these regions by expanding our language and local currency support later this year, deepening our relationships with local technology partners and agencies, and hiring new employees in the market where possible,” he added.
RevenueCat is not yet a profitable company, but Eiting says profitability is always on the horizon. The company still has the money it raised in 2021 and now has more than $40 million in the bank and around $20 million in ARR. It has also halved its burn rate since last summer.
“There is so much we can build through the use of capital and doing it on a profitable basis would just slow us down at the moment. So while there is access to capital, which is not always the case, the best thing for our customers and investors is to raise more capital and deploy it faster,” he told TechCrunch.
“RevenueCat is too important to too many apps to risk the company falling into a financial cliff. This may contradict the prevailing narrative of how venture capital-backed companies should be built, but our investors are aligned with us and know that Miguel and I are running the company to maximize value for developers. Investors make more money when developers make more money,” the CEO added in a blog post. “To that end, we continue to aim to take the company public within this decade,” he said.