Fintech startup Polar has raised $10 million in a seed funding round led by Accel, with participation from several notable angel investors. Founded in September 2024, the company is building payment infrastructure tailored specifically for AI-native SaaS businesses.
Polar offers a Merchant of Record (MoR) billing engine that enables developers to integrate global payments with just six lines of code. The platform handles international sales taxes and seamlessly connects with major AI platforms such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Its user-friendly setup allows AI developers to launch monetized applications quickly without worrying about compliance or payments complexity.
Founded by Birk Jernström, former director of product at Shopify and founder of Tictail (which Shopify acquired in 2018), Polar has already attracted 16,000 developers as customers. Clients include startups like Bolt AI, Midday, OpenPanel, and Repo Prompt. Impressively, Polar has seen online sales from its users grow by more than 120% month-on-month over the past six months.
Jernström says the company’s goal is to eliminate friction for developers so they can focus on building software instead of managing payment and tax infrastructure. “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,” he said. “This funding will help us scale while staying true to our developer-first focus.”
With this funding, Polar plans to further enhance its suite of APIs, SDKs, and backend infrastructure as it scales its reach in the fast-growing AI software economy.