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.
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.”