Birk Jernström is discreetly banking on a solo entrepreneur in a world of billion-dollar valuations and lavish startup teams.
After selling his last company, Tictail, to Shopify for $17 million, Jernström walked away with something more valuable than money: conviction. Not in the cult-of-personality CEO mold, but in the potential of one-person startups built by developers who code at night, ship product alone, and scale with AI instead of headcount.
Now, with his new venture Polar, Jernström wants to fuel this new generation of indie tech founders—people like you, maybe—by giving them exactly what they need to go global on day one: billing, compliance, monetization, and scale, with just a few lines of code.
Because while everyone else is still building the dream startup team, Polar is building the dream infrastructure for a team of one.
Funded by Accel and backed by Shopify’s top brass—including CEO Tobias Lütke—Polar launched in September 2024 and has already onboarded over 18,000 customers. Most are developers. Many are monetizing software side-projects that look more like early GitHub than a Fortune 500 playbook. But that’s the point: with AI automating the work of dozens, and tools like Polar removing the friction of global payments and tax headaches, the “one-person unicorn” doesn’t just feel possible—it feels inevitable.
Even Sam Altman and his circle of tech CEOs are placing bets on when it’ll happen.
For Birk Jernström, the mission is deeply personal. He grew up watching his mother run her own business. He learned to code in his teens. Then he built and sold Tictail, a platform that helped small-scale sellers create online stores as easily as they’d publish a blog. That journey shaped his product philosophy: empower the underdog, and everything else falls into place.
When Shopify acquired Tictail, Jernström went on to help create the Shop app and Shop Pay—core elements of Shopify’s post-IPO consumer play. But as his personal life shifted—he became a father in 2021—so did his perspective. He stepped away from the remote exec life to start from scratch again, this time with a sharper focus: how to help developers skip the startup noise and go straight to revenue.
Polar is his answer. It positions itself as the Merchant of Record, taking on the painful parts of selling globally: taxes, billing, subscriptions, compliance. You plug it in; it just works. And if you’re a developer trying to turn your project into a product—or your product into a business—that’s exactly what you need.
It’s also why Polar’s cap table reads like a who’s who of developer-first founders: from Framer and Raycast to Supabase and Vercel. These aren’t just investors—they’re users. And that’s the point.
Jernström’s hands-on approach shows, too. He’s known to personally respond to 60+ support tickets a day, not out of necessity, but because he wants to know what his customers are building—and how Polar can help them get further, faster, without distraction.
Because ultimately, this isn’t about replacing teams with AI. It’s about replacing permission with power.
And Birk Jernström is betting that, with the right tools, you won’t need a co-founder, a pitch deck, or a growth team to build something worth billions.
You’ll just need code. And Polar.
