Sam Altman and “their CEO of Technology” have a group of bets in the year we will see the first company of one person.
The idea that a single person reaches an assessment of one billion dollars for a startup had been unthinkable without ia. But AI companies for a single person have been sprouting throughout the technology industry and Birk Jernström, CEO de Polar, a “monetization platform to empower personicorns”, is composed of helping them get there.
Polar hopes to stand out from other payment infrastructure platforms when focusing on the needs of developers. With Polar as its ‘registration merchant’ responsible for handling billing and taxes, companies can sell online products and SAAS subscriptions worldwide from day one.
Polar can be implemented with a few lines of code, an approach that resonated with VC firm Accel, which led to the $ 10 million polar seed round. “There is a new generation of AI native businesses and early that wish to grow without distractions,” said partner Andrei Brasoveanu.
He also helped Jernström had an exit to his credit. Shopify acquired its previous startup, tictail, in 2018 for $ 17 million in a fusion of everything in cash. He and his co -founders created it with the ambition to make the sale of online products as easy as creating a blog.
“In 2011, we began tictail with the mission of empowering anyone to start an online store. We launched in 2012 and quickly took off. In a couple of years, we were at home of more than 100,000 merchants on the platform, much Mus in the long tail,” said Jerström.
Recognizing that small merchants needed more traffic, Tictail developed a market that anyone made it a goal for Shopify. The tictail competitor had grown much more and incorporated larger merchants. But after its opi, the Canadian company saw the need to look at the consumer side of things, and believed that the tictail team could help.
Together with his co -founders and several of his employees, Jernström joined the newly created Shopify Shop team. “That became what is now known as the application of the store and the payment ecosystem of the store that I felt honored to be part of the construction from zero to one and scale.”
But in 2021, when he was about to become a father for the first time, Jernström went through a self -reflection period. Ultimately, this led him to give up his remote role to discover his next movement, which turned out to be polar.
The division was completely friendly, so much that the CEO of Shopify, Tobias Lütke, and President Harley Finkelstein are now supporting Polar as angels. The “obsessed with merchants” culture that they built in Shopify was also infected in Jernström.
“I answer more than 50 or 60 support tickets per day. I know all the customers with whom we work, and it is a little crazy, but I love to understand what their next steps are on their trip and how easier”, “,”
Understanding its customer base and being open source helped polar to win traction with its target users. Since its launch in September 2024, the startup has grown to 18,000 clients, most of them are developing software developers.
This is also reflected in its CAP table, which presents entrepreneurs behind the popular developer tools: Framer and Raycast, both or with what polar it integrates; Dub, Nuttt, Rezend, Suppbase, Vercel and Workos; And adorable, that shares the Swedish polar roots and an approach in facilitating construction.
Now, they are supporting Jernström’s ambition to make a business around software as easy as platforms as Suppabase and Vercel to build and climb the software.
This is related to the impulse that AI has created for independent computer pirates and professional developers. But also connects the points with him growing with a business mother as a child; Be a developer since your adolescence; And, of course, Tictail’s trip to lift the little ones.
“What I want to get Polar to achieve is similar to Shopify: how do we empower more the entrepreneurship of developers who can build and follow their own passions and send software independently and build businesses around that”?