Sam Altman and “your CEO of your technology” have a betting pool In the year we will see the first company of one million dollars of a person.
The idea of a single person who reached a $ 1 billion rating for a startup would have been unthinkable without ia. But one person, the first AI companies have sprouted throughout the technology industry and Birk Jerström, CEO of PolarA “monetization platform to empower one person’s unicorns” is ready to help them get there.
Polar expects to highlight other payment infrastructure platforms focusing on the needs of developers. With Polar as a “registration trader” responsible for the management of billing and taxes, companies can sell online products and subscriptions to SAAS worldwide from day one.
Polar can be implemented with some lines of code, a focus that resonated with the VC Accele firm, which led the round $ 10 million round. “There is a new generation of native and native businesses that want to grow without distractions,” said partner Andrei Brasoveanu.
He also helped Jernsröm to have an exit under the belt. Their previous startup, Taactailwas acquired by Shopify in 2018 for $ 17 million in a merger for all cash. He and his co -founders created it with the ambition of selling online products as easy as creating a blog.
“In 2011, we started Tictail with the mission of empowering anyone Start an online store. We launched in 2012 and took off quickly. In a couple of years, we were in the home of more than 100,000 traders on the platform, a lot in the long tail, “said Jernsröm.
Recognizing that small traders needed more traffic, tictail developed a market This turned it into a target for Shopify. The Tictail competitor had grown much greater and on the larger traders. But after their iPoThe Canadian company saw the need to look at consumption consumption and believed that the Tictail team could help it.
Together with his co -founders and several of his employees, Jernsröm Joined to Shopify’s newly created shop team. “This became what is now known as the SHOP Application and the Pay The ecosystem that honored me to be part of the building from scratch to one and climbing. “
But in 2021, when he was about to become a father for the first time, Jernström went through a period of self-reflection. This eventually led him to give up his remote role to find out his next step, which turned out to be polar.
The division was completely friendly, so much so that the CEO of Shopify Tobias Lütke and President Harley Finkelstein are now both Polar as angels. The “merchant -obsessed” culture they built in Shopify also rubbed Jernsröm.
“It responds to more than 50 or 60 support entries a day. I know all the customers we work with, and it is a bit crazy, but I only love to understand what their next steps are on their trip and what can do polar to make it easier,” he said.
Understand their customer base and their being Open source Polar helped gain traction with target users. Since throw In September 2024, the startup has grown up to 18,000 customers, most of them are developers who monate the software.
This is also reflected in his head table, which has entrepreneurs behind the popular developers’ tools: Framer and Raycastboth with which polar integrates; Dub, Nutx, Turn over, Supabase, Verceland Workers; and Kindthat shares the Swedish roots of polar and a focus to make easier to build.
Now, they are supporting Jernsröm’s ambition to make the creation of a business around software as easy as platforms as Supabase and Vercel make it to build and climb their own software.
This is related to the impulse that the AI has created for hackers and professional developers. But it also connects the points with him to grow with a child businessman; to be developer since its adolescents; And, of course, the journey of Tictail to lift the boys.
“What I want Polar to achieve is similar to Shopify: how we seize the more entrepreneurship of developers who can really build and follow their own passions and send software independently and build companies around.”
