Sam Altman and “his tech CEO friends” have a betting pool on the yr we are going to see the primary one-person billion-dollar firm.
The concept 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 all around 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 ‘Merchant of Record’ liable for dealing with billing and taxes, companies can promote on-line merchandise and SaaS subscriptions globally from day one.
Polar will be carried out with a couple of strains of code, an method that resonated with VC agency Accel, which led Polar’s $10 million seed spherical. “There is a new generation of AI-native, early-stage businesses that want to grow without distractions,” accomplice Andrei Brasoveanu mentioned.
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 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 mentioned.
Recognizing that small retailers wanted extra site 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 have a look at the patron facet of issues, and believed Tictail’s workforce might assist.
Collectively along with his cofounders and a number of other of their workers, 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.”
However in 2021, as he was about to turn into a father for the primary time, Jernström went via a interval of self-reflection. This in the end led him to resign from his distant function to determine his subsequent transfer, which turned out to be Polar.
The break up was solely amicable, a lot in order that Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke and president Harley Finkelstein are actually each backing Polar as angels. The “merchant-obsessed” tradition they constructed at Shopify rubbed off on Jernström as nicely.
“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 mentioned.
Understanding its buyer base and being open source helped Polar acquire 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 give attention to 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. However 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 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.”
#Shopify #purchased #startup #Birk #Jernström #builders #construct #oneperson #unicorns
