Sam Altman and “his tech CEO friend” have a pool of bets in the year that saw the first $1 billion company.
The idea that one person would reach a billion dollar valuation for a startup would not have been possible without AI. However, AI-first business is single-person, germinated throughout the tech industry, with Birk Jernström, CEO of Polar, a “monetization platform to strengthen one unicorn,” standing to help them get there.
Polar hopes to stand out from other payment infrastructure platforms by focusing on developer needs. As a “record merchant” by Polar, who handles billing and tax processing, companies can sell online products and SaaS subscriptions globally from day one.
Polar can be implemented in just a few lines of code. This was an approach resonating with VC Firm Accel, leading to Polar’s $10 million seed round. “There’s an early-stage business in a new generation of AI Natives who want to grow without distractions,” said partner Andrei Brazoveanu.
It also helped that Jernström had an outlet under his belt. His previous startup, Tictail, was acquired by Shopify in 2018 in a $17 million all-cash merger. He and his co-founder created it with the ambition to sell products online as easily as creating a blog.
“In 2011, we launched Tictail with the mission of empowering anyone to launch an online store. We launched it in 2012. A few years later, there were over 100,000 merchants living in the platform.
Recognizing that small merchants needed more traffic, Tictail developed a market and ultimately made it a Shopify target. Tictail’s competitors have become much bigger and bigger merchants on board. However, after the IPO, the Canadian company saw the need to look at the consumer side of things and believed the Tictail team would be useful.
Along with his co-founder and some of his employees, Jernström joined Shopify’s newly created shop team. “Eventually it becomes what is now known as the Shop App, and the shop pays for the ecosystem and is part of a building from scratch to one to one, and is honored to be part of scaling.”
However, in 2021, Jernström went through a period of self-reflection as he was trying to become his first father. This ultimately led him to resign from his remote role and grasp his next move.
The division was completely friendly, so Shopify CEOs Tobias Lütke and President Harley Finkelstein still support Polar as Angels. The “merchandian-loving” culture they built on Shopify also frayed out at Jernström.
“I answer over 50 or 60 support tickets a day. I know all the customers we work with. It’s a little crazy, but I love realizing what their next step is on their journey and what Polar can do to make it easier,” he said.
Understanding your customer base and being open source helped you gain polar spots with your target audience. Since its launch in September 2024, the startup has grown to 18,000 customers, most of which are developers who monetize the software.
This is also reflected in the cap table, which features the entrepreneurs behind popular developer tools. Dub, Nuxt, Resend, Supabase, Vercel, and Workos; and Lovable, which shares the Swedish roots of Polar and focuses on making it easier to build.
Now they support Jernström’s ambition to build a business around software that is as simple as platforms like Supabase and Vercel.
This is tied to the momentum AI has created for indie hackers and professional developers. But it also connects the dots with him, who grew up with his entrepreneurial mom since he was a child, and has been a developer since his teenage years, and of course Tictail is on a journey to lift up the little guys.
“What we want to achieve for Polar is similar to Shopify. How can we enhance the entrepreneurial spirit of developers who can actually build their own passions and supply them to the ship and build their surroundings?”
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