Skene: Helsinki-based startup raises €800k to help vibe coders grow their apps
Helsinki-based Skene has successfully closed an €800,000 pre-seed funding round led by Superhero Capital, with notable participation from NVIDIA executives. Led by Teemu Kinos, the former co-founder of GetJenny, and his co-founders Teppo Hudsson and Michele Boggia, the company plans to utilize this capital to scale its operations and aims to surpass €1M in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). The investment will specifically accelerate the development of Skene’s offering, allowing them to expand their autonomous growth capabilities to support the full user journey by the spring of 2026.
Skene addresses the “execution gap” in software development by providing an AI agent that directly analyzes a product’s source code to understand its logic, structure, and intended utility. Unlike legacy tools that rely on manual workflows or surface-level data, Skene’s AI interprets the actual code to automatically generate evolving user guidance and best practices within minutes. By automating these critical onboarding and engagement steps, the platform helps companies drive “Product-Led Growth” (PLG)—boosting activation, feature adoption, and retention—without needing to scale human headcount in sales or customer success.
Trending Topics: What is the business model of Skene, and how do you get to your $1 million ARR goal?
Teemu Kinos: Our model is built on actions and outcomes. Our upcoming PLG service will sell token bundles that users buy upfront, similar to how Lovable works. One token equals one action, like generating a custom onboarding step or sending a re-activation email to a user who’s been MIA for 14 days.
In the beginning, we looked at an ROI based model where we’d take a cut of the value created, but that got confusing fast. Since different actions have different levels of impact, it was hard for devs to wrap their heads around. Tokens are just much cleaner and easier to understand.
We approach growth in a similar way to industry leaders by building a community around the challenge we are solving. This strategy has catapulted other companies to tremendous growth. Our communities on Reddit are already active, and now we are tapping into Open Source communities with the release of our Growth Stack.
Who are the users, and what is the target market?
We are targeting “vibe coders” who are building products using tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and v0.
Why did you pivot just recently?
The market is moving so fast that you have to be able to shift gears quickly. Basically, we were trying to solve 2026 problems with a 2016 playbook. Back in 2016, you’d sign up for a service on a website and set it up there. By 2026, that is just unnecessary friction. These days, products need to live right inside the IDE or they won’t get used. It is the same path that made companies like Supabase, Vercel, and Resend so successful.
How do you think about the vibe coding trend, and how do your agents fit into this?
Guillermo Rauch from Vercel recently posted that all software will be generative and generated, and we are all in on that. Vibe coding isn’t a fad; it is the new standard. But this new era needs a specific stack to actually work:
- Payments: Stripe
- Hosting: Vercel
- Database: Supabase
- Comms: Resend
- Growth: Skene
If we don’t solve the growth side, we are just going to end up with a million “ghost apps” that no one uses. That growth gap is exactly where Skene comes in.
