From Tictail to Polar: Birk Jernströms Journey to Empower One-Person Unicorns in the AI-Driven Business World
In the world of technology, the idea of a single individual reaching a billion-dollar valuation for their startup was once unimaginable. However, with the rise of AI-driven businesses, this dream is becoming a reality. One such entrepreneur is Birk Jernström, CEO of Polar, a "monetization platform to empower one-person unicorns." Jernström's journey in the tech industry began with his previous startup, Tictail, which was acquired by Shopify in 2018 for $17 million. Tictail was created with the ambition to make selling goods online as easy as creating a blog, and it quickly gained traction with over 100,000 merchants on the platform. However, as Tictail's competitors grew larger and onboarded larger merchants, Shopify saw the need to focus on the consumer side of things. Jernström and his cofounders joined Shopify's newly created Shop team, where he was part of building the Shop app and Shop Pay ecosystem from scratch and scaling it. In 2021, as Jernström was about to become a father for the first time, he went through a period of self-reflection. This led him to resign from his remote role at Shopify to figure out his next move, which turned out to be Polar. The split was amicable, and both Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke and president Harley Finkelstein are now backing Polar as angels. Polar aims 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 just a few lines of code, which resonated with VC firm Accel, which led Polar’s $10 million seed round. Jernström's understanding of his customer base and being open source has 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. The company's cap table features entrepreneurs behind popular developer tools such as 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. Jernström's ambition for Polar is 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 Jernström's upbringing 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," Jernström said. With this vision in mind, Polar is poised to be a game-changer in the world of one-person unicorns.
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