Stockholm-based Polar, a company that offers a modern way to sell SaaS and digital products, has secured $10M (approximately €8.68M) in seed funding led by Accel.
The round attracted participation from notable angel investors, including Guillermo Rauch and Jared Palmer (Vercel), Paul Copplestone (Supabase), Tobi Lütke and Harley Finkelstein (Shopify), Michael Grinich (WorkOS), Thomas Paul Mann (Raycast), Anton Osika (Lovable), Jorn van Dijk and Koen Bok (Framer), Zeno Rocha (Resend), Steven Tey (Dub), and Sébastien and Alexandre Chopin (Nuxt).
Accel, which led the funding round, has backed companies including 1Password, Atlassian, Bumble, CrowdStrike, Slack, Spotify, and UiPath over the past 40+ years, focusing on venture capital partnerships from inception through all phases of private company growth
Andrei Brasoveanu, partner at Accel, says, “The reputation and traction that Polar already has in the developer community are extremely impressive, and it’s exciting to partner with such an experienced, product-focused founder as Birk on this investment. There is a new generation of AI-native, early-stage businesses that want to grow without distractions. There’s a clear opportunity for Polar’s open-source Merchant of Record to meet this need and become the best monetisation platform for developers.”
Six lines of code: addressing AI-native SaaS billing complexity
Polar is a payments infrastructure company founded by Birk Jernström in 2022. Jernström previously served as Director of Product (Shop) at Shopify following the acquisition of his company, Tictail, by the e-commerce giant in 2018.
The company supports AI-native SaaS businesses by providing tools for billing implementation. It manages sales tax and billing operations, enabling developers to focus on product development and offer subscriptions and digital products worldwide. Its customer base includes Bolt AI, Midday, OpenPanel, and Repo Prompt.
Modern SaaS and usage-based billing typically requires extensive code for common billing patterns, metering, and entitlements, forcing developers to spend significant time on billing integration rather than product development.
Polar’s Merchant of Record solution can be implemented in less than a minute with just six lines of code, targeting a new generation of AI-native SaaS businesses where developers struggle with monetisation and international scaling.
The platform automatically ingests customer events and token consumption from OpenAI, Anthropic, S3 consumption, and data streams, whilst handling global sales tax liabilities.
The company claims to have grown to more than 18,000 customers across 100+ countries since launching its billing platform in September 2024.
Funds to expand operations globally
Polar will use the capital to expand its team, build the next generation of billing primitives for developers, and grow its community of developers and operational relationships globally.
Birk Jernström, founder and CEO of Polar, says, “Our mission at Polar is to empower developers to ship faster and build businesses around their software – leaving billing and international sales tax headaches to us. We’re proud to be an open source, developer-first company, and our focus over the past years has been entirely on building high-quality and innovative APIs, SDKs and products that help passionate coders monetise their software.”
Polar claims to have experienced over 120 per cent month-on-month growth in average online sales over the past six months.
“This funding will help us to scale Polar up while maintaining this dedication to developers and their businesses, and we’re honoured and thrilled to have Accel and incredible angels behind us on this next chapter.”
Open-source expansion
According to the company, Polar is now home to 16,000 developers monetising their software through the platform. The company offers automated SaaS entitlements and digital products, including licence keys, file downloads, GitHub and Discord access, plus custom entitlements distributed directly to customers.
Polar integrates seamlessly with Framer, Raycast, and Zapier, providing developers with a pathway to upselling without managing sales tax or building custom features.
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