In the spring of 2023, according to the CEO’s own account, three things that a startup cannot easily live without broke in the same week: RevenueCat’s bank, its Series B investor and its servers. Jacob Eiting wrote about it a year later in the blog post announcing a $12 million extension to the company’s Series C — the “mini” round he used to explain how a company that had been handed a sky-high valuation two years earlier ended up having to rebuild how it worked. By May 2025, TechCrunch reported that Bain Capital Ventures had led a $50 million Series C that valued the company at $500 million post-money — a figure Eiting joked made RevenueCat worth “half a corn,” a nod to the billion-dollar “unicorns.”

The arc between those two points is the story: a founder who took a term sheet he later called disconnected from reality, hit a wall, and responded not by raising more money but by changing what the company was for.

Two engineers and a boring problem

Eiting and Miguel Carranza both came from Elevate, the brain-training app, where Eiting was CTO and Carranza was director of engineering. In a July 2018 TechCrunch profile of their Y Combinator–backed startup, Eiting said Elevate’s move from one-off purchases to subscriptions “saved the company” — and that handling subscriptions across Apple and Google was a problem developers hated. It “is just boring — developers don’t want to do it,” he told TechCrunch. RevenueCat’s pitch was an API that let an app developer add subscriptions on iOS and Android without wrestling with each store’s quirks, plus one place to see subscription data across both.

In Eiting’s own 2024 telling, the company began as two engineers in a living room and, seven years on, served roughly 30,000 apps.

The term sheet he called “pure fantasy”

The inflection started with good news. In February 2021 — near the peak of the zero-interest-rate era — RevenueCat received a Series B term sheet that preempted the round, at a valuation Eiting described in his blog as “pure fantasy.” Annual recurring revenue had just grown from $1 million to $3 million in a year.

Then growth slowed in 2021 and again in 2022. Eiting wrote that he worried the company had “flown ourselves into a box canyon”: the money and the valuation were there, and the momentum that was supposed to justify both was not.

The week everything broke

Eiting’s account of spring 2023 is brief: the company’s bank, its Series B investor, and its servers all failed in the same week. He doesn’t dramatise it, and neither will we — the blog post gives no further detail, and it would be guesswork to add some. What he does say is what happened after: the founders refocused on shipping products and on helping developers make money, a shift that brought what he called a “rapid cultural turnover” inside the company. Growth reaccelerated in 2023, and he expected 2024 to follow the same pattern.

By April 2024, the numbers had changed shape. Pulse 2.0 reported the $12 million round was led by Adjacent, with Y Combinator, Index Ventures, Volo Ventures and the SaaStr Fund also in, taking total funding past $68 million, with annual recurring revenue of $20 million and more than 32,000 apps on the platform. Eiting’s own post put cash in the bank above $40 million and said the burn rate had been cut in half since the summer of 2023 — while saying the company was deliberately not yet profitable.

Buying a spicy audiobook app to test billing

The most unusual move in the recovery came in September 2024. TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez reported that RevenueCat had bought Dipsea, a subscription app for romantic audio fiction, in an all-cash deal, its first acquisition. The price wasn’t disclosed. Dipsea, per TechCrunch, had about 93,847 paying subscribers, annual recurring revenue near $6 million, a five-person team and $13.63 million in total funding, and had struggled to find an exit as a venture-backed startup.

The logic was operational, not financial. A subscription-tools company that doesn’t run a subscription app has to guess whether its new features work. By owning one, RevenueCat could test paywall and billing changes on live users before selling them to customers. “The App Store has completely turned over in the time since we started,” Eiting told TechCrunch. It is a notable choice for a company whose pitch is neutrality toward other people’s apps — and a revealing one, since it prioritises first-hand evidence over appearing above the fray.

$500 million, and a stated goal of going public

In May 2025, TechCrunch reported the round: $50 million led by Bain Capital Ventures, with Index Ventures, Y Combinator, Adjacent, Volo Ventures and the SaaStr Fund returning, valuing RevenueCat at $500 million post-money and bringing total funding to about $100 million. The company said its software powered subscriptions in more than 70,000 mobile apps, with roughly one in three new subscription apps launching on it, and TechCrunch named OpenAI — for its ChatGPT app — among its customers. Web billing, in beta, put it up against Stripe, Recurly and Chargebee.

Eiting’s stated destination is unambiguous. In his 2024 post he wrote that a “profitable, growing, public RevenueCat is the best long term ownership structure for the company”; a year later he told TechCrunch, “I think we can build a public-scale company.”

What founders can take from it

First, a rich term sheet is a bet on the future, not a result. RevenueCat took one at a valuation its own CEO later called fantasy, and the two years that followed were about earning it. Second, the pivot that mattered wasn’t a new product category; it was a cultural change toward shipping and toward customers’ revenue, which Eiting says in his own words turned the company over. Third, the recovery ran through discipline — halving burn — more than through a new fundraising narrative. And a caveat on all of this: nearly every inside detail above comes from Eiting’s own blog post, which is a founder’s retelling written to support a financing announcement. The outside numbers (rounds, valuation, customer counts, the Dipsea details) are what independent reporting confirms.

This is an editorial profile assembled from the public record, not an interview. Sources: RevenueCat — “We raised money again” (Jacob Eiting, April 2024), TechCrunch — RevenueCat raises $50M as it expands beyond mobile app monetization (May 22, 2025), TechCrunch — RevenueCat acquires a spicy audiobooks app (Sept. 26, 2024), TechCrunch — YC-backed RevenueCat helps developers manage their in-app subscriptions (July 23, 2018), Pulse 2.0 — RevenueCat secures $12 million, Pulse 2.0 — RevenueCat $50 million Series C.