Latest news with #BirkJernström
Finextra
2 days ago
- Business
- Finextra
Payment infrastructure startup Polar raises $10 million
Polar, a fintech startup building payment infrastructure for AI-native SaaS companies, has raised a $10 million Seed round. 0 The funding round was led by Accel with support from a host of prominent angel investors. Launched in September 2024, Polar offers a Merchant of Record (MoR) billing engine designed for the next generation of developers. Polar integrates with just six lines of code, enabling AI-native businesses to onboard and start accepting payments globally in minutes, with Polar taking care of global sales taxes and connections to popular products from OpenAI or Anthropic. Founded by Birk Jernström - former director of product at Shopify and ex-founder at Tictail (acquired by Shopify in 2018) - Polar currently counts 16,000 developers as customers. Average online sales have grown more than 120% month-on-month for the past six months, with customers including Bolt AI, Midday, OpenPanel and Repo Prompt. Says Jernström: 'Our mission at Polar is to empower developers to ship faster and build businesses around their software - leaving billing and international sales tax headaches to us. Our focus over the past years has been entirely on building high-quality and innovative APIs, SDKs and products that help passionate coders monetize their software. This funding will help us to scale Polar up while maintaining this dedication to developers and their businesses.'
TechCrunch
3 days ago
- Business
- TechCrunch
After Shopify bought his last startup, Birk Jernström wants to help developers build one-person unicorns
Sam Altman and 'his tech CEO friends' have a betting pool on the year we will see the first one-person billion-dollar company. The idea of a single person reaching a billion-dollar valuation for a startup would have been unthinkable without AI. But single-person, AI-first businesses have been sprouting all over the tech industry and Birk Jernström, CEO of Polar, a 'monetization platform to empower one-person unicorns,' is standing by to help them get there. Polar hopes to stand out from other payment infrastructure platforms by focusing on the needs of developers. With Polar as their 'Merchant of Record' responsible for handling billing and taxes, businesses can sell online products and SaaS subscriptions globally from day one. Polar can be implemented with a few lines of code, an approach that resonated with VC firm Accel, which led Polar's $10 million seed round. 'There is a new generation of AI-native, early-stage businesses that want to grow without distractions,' partner Andrei Brasoveanu said. It also helped that Jernström had an exit under his belt. His previous startup, Tictail, was acquired by Shopify in 2018 for $17 million in an all-cash merger. He and his cofounders created it with the ambition to make selling goods online as easy as creating a blog. 'In 2011, we started Tictail with the mission of empowering anyone to start an online store. We launched in 2012 and it quickly took off. In a couple of years, we were home to 100,000+ merchants on the platform, very much on the long tail,' Jernström said. Recognizing that small merchants needed more traffic, Tictail developed a marketplace that eventually made it a target for Shopify. Tictail's competitor had grown much bigger and onboarded larger merchants. But after its IPO, the Canadian company saw the need to look at the consumer side of things, and believed Tictail's team could help. Techcrunch event Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW Together with his cofounders and several of their employees, Jernström joined Shopify's newly created Shop team. 'That eventually became what's now known as the Shop app and the Shop Pay ecosystem that I was honored to be a part of building from zero to one, and of scaling.' But in 2021, as he was about to become a father for the first time, Jernström went through a period of self-reflection. This ultimately led him to resign from his remote role to figure out his next move, which turned out to be Polar. The split was entirely amicable, so much so that Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke and president Harley Finkelstein are now both backing Polar as angels. The 'merchant-obsessed' culture they built at Shopify rubbed off on Jernström as well. 'I answer more than 50 or 60 support tickets a day. I know every single customer that we work with, and it's a bit crazy, but I just love understanding what their next steps are in their journey, and what Polar can do to make that easier for them,' he said. Understanding its customer base and being open source helped Polar gain traction with its target users. Since launching in September 2024, the startup has grown to 18,000 customers, most of them being developers monetizing software. This is also reflected on its cap table, which features entrepreneurs behind popular developer tools: Framer and Raycast, both of which Polar integrates with; Dub, Nuxt, Resend, Supabase, Vercel, and WorkOS; and Lovable, which shares Polar's Swedish roots and a focus on making it easier to build. Now, they are backing Jernström's ambition to make building a business around software as easy as platforms like Supabase and Vercel make it to build and scale the software itself. This ties into the momentum that AI has created for indie hackers and professional developers. But it also connects the dots with him growing up with an entrepreneur mom as a kid; being a developer since his teens; and of course, Tictail's journey of lifting up the little guys. 'What I want Polar to achieve is similar to Shopify: How do we empower more entrepreneurship of developers that can actually build and follow their own passions and ship software independently and build businesses around that.'
