'Reality hit': Kinde's struggles after being being founded in a frothy market
Kinde, which turned three years old this week, was founded in 2021 at the peak of the pandemic bubble. Founder Ross Chaldecott says it wasn't easy.
When Ross Chaldecott and his Kinde co-founders raised $10.6 million in seed funding, he expected to grow their team to nearly 60 people. However, two years later, with employee numbers reaching only about half that figure, he had to make 30% of them redundant.
“Reality hit,” Chaldecott said.
Kinde builds essential technical infrastructure for digital companies, with its first product — an authentication tool — competing with Okta. The startup’s second offering, a billing platform, is set to launch early next year. Over 55,000 businesses, representing around 2 million individuals, currently use Kinde’s tools.
Chaldecott declined to specify how many of these users are paying customers (businesses with up to 10,500 users can access Kinde for free), but noted that the platform’s user base has grown by 20% each month.
Much like Atlassian succeeded by providing tools to a burgeoning community of developers, Kinde’s strategy is to ride the startup industry’s expansion. Its revenue model — charging companies based on the number of employees — is inspired by venture capital, with the idea that gaining traction early with startups will yield high returns as these businesses scale into large organisations with tens of thousands of employees.
