Swedish FinTech startup Polar raises €8.6 million for its monetisation platform

Stockholm-based Polar has announced a €8.6 million Seed funding round to expand its remote-first team across Europe and invest in growth, developer relations, and strategic partnerships throughout the payments ecosystem.

The round was led by Accel, with continued backing from Abstract and Mischief, including Angel invetors Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Paul Copplestone (Supabase), Tobi Lütke and Harley Finkelstein (Shopify), Michael Grinich (WorkOS), Anton Osika (Lovable), Thomas Paul Mann (Raycast), Jorn van Dijk and Koen Bok (Framer), Zeno Rocha (Resend), Jared Palmer (Vercel), Steven Tey (Dub), and Sébastien and Alexandre Chopin (Nuxt).

Birk Jernström, Founder and CEO of Polar, shared the announcement with the statement: “It’s never been easier to build, ship & scale software. But, it has never been harder to monetise software. It’s a bottleneck for the future. We’re building the open-source monetization platform to empower future one-developer unicorns.”

Founded in 2022, Polar is an open-source monetisation platform for digital products & SaaS. Since launching v1.0 in September 2024, Polar has seen rapid traction, with thousands of developers using the platform to grow their revenue by over 120% month-over-month on average across the past six months.

According to the company, the Polar community has played a critical role in shaping the platform’s development. With over 17,000 signups, 16,000+ followers on X, 5,300 GitHub stars, and 1,500 members in its Discord community, developers continue to contribute feedback, features, and pull requests that help evolve the open-source monetization platform.

The company believes software development is more accessible than ever, thanks to open-source tools and advancements in AI. Shipping and scaling software has also become easier, with modern cloud platforms like Vercel and Supabase enabling global deployments.

However, monetisation remains a significant challenge, particularly in a landscape evolving from one-time purchases to SaaS, and now to usage-based and agentic pricing models. This, Polar argues, is the bottleneck of the future.

Polar is being built to support a new generation of creators – solo developers and early-stage startups that will become the enterprises of tomorrow. The platform goes beyond traditional billing to bridge product analytics, CRM, and billing into a single, developer-centric monetisation stack.

Among its key offerings:

• Usage-based billing on autopilot: Automatically ingest and bill usage events from OpenAI, Anthropic, Vercel AI SDK, S3 and more.

• Zero boilerplate: Common SaaS entitlements like license keys and usage credits are automated, with integrations requiring just four lines of code.

• Zero operations: Polar handles international sales tax, compliance, fraud, and chargeback protection as the merchant of record.

• Open source foundation: Transparent and designed for community contributions.

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