Skalar exits stealth with $125M committed to fund startup growth
What's the deal? Skalar, a fintech cofounded by Sebastián Cárdenas and Daniel Castrillón, exited stealth on Thursday, September 17, with commitments to finance more than $125 million in sales and marketing spend across seven technology companies over the next 12 months. Founded in New York in January 2026, the company closed a seed round in the first quarter of the year — led by Monashees, with participation from Nido Ventures and angel investors — and struck a strategic capital partnership with General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund (CVF).
How it works: Skalar lends to companies with recurring revenue so they can acquire customers, then gets repaid as those customers pay. There is no fixed schedule and no equity given up; in its current contracts, Skalar aims to collect roughly 1.1 times what it deploys.
If a company spends $10 to win a customer who pays $1 a month for 30 months, Skalar puts up the $10 and collects the first $11. If the customer leaves after eight months, Skalar gets $8 and absorbs the loss.
Why it's different: Unlike venture debt, whose repayments can force marketing cuts, or revenue-based financing, which advances money against sales that already exist, Skalar finances revenue that does not yet exist. It funds each month or quarter of commercial spend rather than handing over a lump sum.
The product: Skalar describes its model as "Precision Financing," using granular data to track risk in real time. It targets companies spending between $100,000 and $3 million a month on customer acquisition, and plans to serve a maximum of 15 per year. Of its first seven clients, four or five are Latin American and the rest operate in the United States.
Why now? The opportunity opened because General Catalyst, focused on ever-larger deals, wanted a regional partner for smaller companies. Cárdenas had spent three years at Monashees, where he brought the CVF credit strategy to Latin America and became, in his words, "completely obsessed with that structure" (translated from Spanish).
"The best companies are careful to match their sources and uses of capital," said Andrew Ziperski, a partner at the Customer Value Fund, in a statement. "Most technology companies in Latin America have never had that option, and Sebastián came to us with that gap in mind" (translated from Spanish).
The signal: Skalar bets that performance-aligned financing can fund growth that equity alone cannot reach. Cárdenas frames it as "the most important innovation in the technology capital markets over the next decade" — a wager that founders will increasingly separate capital for customer acquisition from money raised for product bets.
Read more: portafolio.co, ffnews.com
Image credit: Serpstat
