Sam Altman and “HIS Tech CEO Friends” Have a bet pool In the year we will see the first one-person billion dollar.
The idea of a single person reaching a billion assessment for starting would have been unthinkable without AI. But one-person, AI-first businesses has grown throughout the TE industry and Birk Jernström, Director General of Polar“Money platform to authorize single-person unicorn,” stands to help them achieve it.
Polar hopes to excel from other payment infrastructure platforms per focus on the needs of developers. With Polar as their “Recorder of Record” responsible for handling billing and taxes, companies can sell online products and SaaS bonds worldwide from the first day.
Polar can be implemented by a few lines of code, an approach that resonated with VC company Accel, which led the seed of $ 10 million from Polar. “There is a new generation of AI native, early stages that want to grow without distractions,” partner Andrei Brasoveanu said.
It also helped that Jernström had an exit under his belt. Its previous startup, Tictailwas acquired by Shopify in 2018 for $ 17 million in all-currency merger. He and his co -founders created it with the ambition to make it easy to sell goods as easily as creating a blog.
“In 2011, we started tictail with the mission to empower anyone Start an online store. We launched in 2012 and it flew quickly. In a few years, we were home to 100,000+ merchants on the platform, very much on the long tail, “Jernström said.
Recognizing that small retailers need more traffic, tictail developed a market That eventually made it a target for Shopify. Tictail’s competitor has grown much larger and on board larger traders. But after Its ipeThe Canadian company saw the need to look at the consumer side of things, and believed that the Tictail team could help.
Along with his co -founders and several of their employees, Jernström joined Shopify’s newly created shop. “That eventually became what is now known as the Shop program and the Shop payment An ecosystem, which I honored to be part of building zero to one, and of climbing. ”
But in 2021, because he was going to go father for the first time, Jernström crossed a period of self -reflection. This ultimately led him to resign from his distant role to ascertain his next move, which turned out to be polar.
The split was completely friendly, so Tobias Lütke, general manager of Shopify, and President Harley Finkelstein, now support poles like angels. The “businessman obsessed” culture they built at Shopify also rubbed on Jernström.
“I answer more than 50 or 60 support tickets every day. I know every customer we work with, and it’s a little crazy, but I just love to understand what their next steps are on their journey, and what Polar can do to make them easier,” he said.
Understanding its customer base and being Open source helped Polar gain traction with their target users. Since launching In September 2024, the starting grew to 18,000 customers, most of them are developers monetizing programs.
This also reflects its cap table, which features entrepreneurs behind popular developers: Framer And RaycastBoth with which poles are integrated; Dub,, Nuxt,, Return,, Supabase,, Verceland Workers; And Lovablewhich shares Polar’s Swedish roots and focus to facilitate the construction.
Now they support Jernström’s ambition to make business building around software as easy as platforms like Supabase and Vercel make it build and scale the program itself.
This links the moment AI created for indie -hackers and professional developers. But it also ties the points with him growing with a business mom as a child; To be a developer since his teens; And of course, Tictail’s journey to raise the little ones.
“What I want Polar to reach is similar to Shopify: How we authorize more entrepreneurship of developers who can actually build and follow their own passions and ship programs independently and build companies around it.”
