Sam Altman and “his tech CEO associates” have a betting pool on the 12 months we’ll see the primary one-person billion-dollar firm.
The thought of a single particular person reaching a billion-dollar valuation for a startup would have been unthinkable with out AI. However single-person, AI-first companies have been sprouting everywhere in the tech business and Birk Jernström, CEO of Polar, a “monetization platform to empower one-person unicorns,” is standing by to assist them get there.
Polar hopes to face out from different cost infrastructure platforms by specializing in the wants of builders. With Polar as their ‘Service provider of Report’ answerable for dealing with billing and taxes, companies can promote on-line merchandise and SaaS subscriptions globally from day one.
Polar could be applied with just a few traces of code, an method that resonated with VC agency Accel, which led Polar’s $10 million seed spherical. “There’s a new technology of AI-native, early-stage companies that need to develop with out distractions,” companion Andrei Brasoveanu stated.
It additionally helped that Jernström had an exit underneath his belt. His earlier 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 promoting items on-line as simple as making a weblog.
“In 2011, we began Tictail with the mission of empowering anybody to start out an internet retailer. We launched in 2012 and it shortly took off. In a few years, we have been dwelling to 100,000+ retailers on the platform, very a lot on the lengthy tail,” Jernström stated.
Recognizing that small retailers wanted extra visitors, Tictail developed a market that finally made it a goal for Shopify. Tictail’s competitor had grown a lot larger and onboarded bigger retailers. However after its IPO, the Canadian firm noticed the necessity to take a look at the buyer facet of issues, and believed Tictail’s group might assist.
Collectively together with his cofounders and several other of their staff, Jernström joined Shopify’s newly created Store group. “That finally turned what’s now generally known as the Store app and the Store Pay ecosystem that I used to be honored to be part of constructing from zero to 1, and of scaling.”
However in 2021, as he was about to develop into a father for the primary time, Jernström went by way of a interval of self-reflection. This in the end led him to resign from his distant position to determine his subsequent transfer, which turned out to be Polar.
The cut up was solely amicable, a lot in order that Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke and president Harley Finkelstein at the moment are each backing Polar as angels. The “merchant-obsessed” tradition they constructed at Shopify rubbed off on Jernström as effectively.
“I reply greater than 50 or 60 help tickets a day. I do know each single buyer that we work with, and it’s a bit loopy, however I simply love understanding what their subsequent steps are of their journey, and what Polar can do to make that simpler for them,” he stated.
Understanding its buyer base and being open supply helped Polar achieve traction with its goal customers. Since launching in September 2024, the startup has grown to 18,000 prospects, most of them being builders monetizing software program.
That is additionally mirrored on its cap desk, which options entrepreneurs behind fashionable developer instruments: Framer and Raycast, each of which Polar integrates with; Dub, Nuxt, Resend, Supabase, Vercel, and WorkOS; and Lovable, which shares Polar’s Swedish roots and a deal with making it simpler to construct.
Now, they’re backing Jernström’s ambition to make constructing a enterprise round software program as simple as platforms like Supabase and Vercel make it to construct and scale the software program itself.
This ties into the momentum that AI has created for indie hackers {and professional} builders. Nevertheless it additionally connects the dots with him rising up with an entrepreneur mother as a child; being a developer since his teenagers; and naturally, Tictail’s journey of lifting up the little guys.
“What I would like Polar to realize is just like Shopify: How will we empower extra entrepreneurship of builders that may really construct and comply with their very own passions and ship software program independently and construct companies round that.”
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