Polar

Polar is a Stockholm payments company founded by Birk Jernström (whose previous startup Tictail was acquired by Shopify). It acts as Merchant of Record, handling international sales tax, VAT, fraud, and chargebacks on behalf of digital sellers, with billing, entitlements, and usage-based pricing exposed through a developer-first API. It targets AI-native and SaaS developers who want monetisation without running their own tax and compliance stack. Founder-led; $10M seed led by Accel with Abstract and Mischief.