Skalar, a New York fintech building an alternative way to fund customer growth at later-stage technology companies, has come out of stealth. The firm began operating in January and went public last week after lining up an undisclosed seed round led by Brazilian venture firm Monashees, plus a debt partnership with General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund.
The problem Skalar targets is familiar to growth-stage software companies.
They often spend heavily on sales and marketing long before new customers generate enough revenue to cover those costs.
Traditional options—more equity or conventional venture debt—can dilute founders or impose rigid repayment schedules that squeeze cash just when companies want to keep investing in growth.
Skalar’s structure is different. It advances capital specifically for customer acquisition.
Companies repay the money from the revenue those newly acquired customers actually produce.
Typical terms aim for roughly 1.1 times the amount advanced. In a simple illustration, if a company spends $10 to win a customer expected to pay $1 a month for 30 months, Skalar funds the $10 and collects the first $11 of that customer’s payments.
After that cap, remaining revenue stays with the company. If the customer cancels early, Skalar takes only what was generated and writes off the rest.
Co-founder and CEO Sebastián Cárdenas summed it up: the firm is repaid only as the startup is repaid. There is no fixed calendar deadline.
That risk-sharing approach sets it apart from both venture debt, which usually demands payments regardless of results, and most revenue-based financing, which typically funds existing contracts rather than future customers. Because Skalar absorbs much of the downside, it underwrites carefully.
It reviews transaction-level data on acquisition cost, retention, and lifetime value, then updates those assessments as new information arrives.
Co-founder and COO Daniel Castrillón said the team has built expertise in judging when those risks are predictable enough to finance.
The model is not risk-free for founders.
Skalar can set minimum performance thresholds and accelerate repayment or pause further funding if results lag.
Estimates around attribution, margins, and currency can also prove imperfect. Still, the agreements do not include asset seizures or traditional financial covenants.
Skalar is starting narrowly. It looks for technology companies spending $100,000 to $3 million a month on customer acquisition, with a track record of earning more from those customers than they cost to win, and enough cash to survive until the revenue arrives.
It has already committed more than $125 million across seven companies for the next year—several in Latin America and others in the United States—and plans to work with no more than about 15 firms annually at first.
The idea grew out of Cárdenas’s time as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Monashees, where he connected portfolio companies with General Catalyst’s similar Customer Value Fund.
That program has increasingly focused on larger deals, leaving room for a specialist serving smaller and regional companies.
Monashees partner Caio Bolognesi said growth-stage capital in Latin America has been inconsistent; Skalar is meant to give strong operators runway while they build the metrics later-stage equity investors want.
Over time the founders hope to finance other predictable operating costs and reach companies that never raise institutional venture capital. For those that do raise equity, the product offers a way to fund measurable growth without additional dilution.