Stockholm-based FinTech startup Polar recently closed an impressive €8.6 million seed funding round. With this investment they will be able to grow their open-source monetization platform for digit products and SaaS. Founded in 2022, Polar started with a mission to help developers monetize their software without the hassle. The company plans to use the funding to grow its remote-first team across Europe. In addition, they plan to focus on building for growth, improving developer relations and creating strategic alliances across the payments ecosystem.

As the merchant of record, Polar’s platform provides international sales tax and compliance, fraud, and chargeback protection. Since launching, Polar has been gaining steam, drawing thousands of creative developers to their platform. The company touts some “jaw-dropping” growth statistics among its users. Revenue-wise, they’ve averaged well over 120% growth month-over-month for the last six months. Polar released v1.0 of its platform in September 2024.

The community has attracted a significant response to the company’s open-source model, with over 17,000 signups. As you can imagine, Polar has a robust online community. They recently surpassed 16,000+ followers on X, over 5300 stars on GitHub, and they have 1500+ members in their Discord community. Polar tells us that this community has been essential in guiding the ongoing development of the platform and its features.

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. - Birk Jernström, Founder and CEO of Polar