David Dokes

One dashboard, all the data, none of the data team

Ask most direct-to-consumer founders how they measure their business and you get a familiar answer: a spreadsheet, a stack of browser tabs, and a nagging sense that the numbers do not quite agree. Ad platforms report one thing, the email tool another, and the inventory system a third. Polar Analytics, the company Dokes co-founded in 2020, exists to end that argument. It pulls a brand's marketing, sales, and operational data into a single source of truth, then lets non-technical operators query it without writing code.

The number Dokes likes to cite is time. The kind of data infrastructure that Polar sets up in a couple of days once took retailers somewhere between six months and a year to stand up, and usually required a dedicated engineering team to do it. That gap - between the brands that could afford a data warehouse and the ones that could not - is the whole reason the company exists. "E-commerce brands are undersold and overwhelmed with data," Dokes has said, and Polar's answer is to hand smaller merchants the same tooling the giants already run.

Lately the product has pushed past reporting into action. Polar has layered in first-party data collection and AI agents that read a brand's numbers and suggest, or take, the next step. In early 2025 the company joined the Anthropic Claude directory for commerce, a signal of where Dokes wants the platform to go: from telling brands what happened to helping them decide what to do next.

From a growth internship to the corner office

Dokes did not arrive at data from the outside. Before Polar he led growth at Turo, the car-sharing marketplace, where he started as a growth marketing intern and worked his way up to running product and growth with a marketing budget in the neighborhood of $20 million a year. That job taught him the marketer's frustration firsthand: the constant fight to reconcile channels, attribute results, and trust a dashboard enough to spend real money against it.

He paired that operating experience with a technical foundation. Dokes holds a Master of Science in computer science through a dual-degree engineering program at CentraleSupelec, one of France's most selective schools, along with an MBA from ESCP. The combination is the point - he can talk to the data scientists building the pipelines and to the marketers who need answers from them, without either side losing him.

In 2020 he teamed up with Charbel Seif, a former data scientist at Airbnb, and the two split the founder job along their strengths: an operator who had lived the customer's pain and an engineer who had built data systems at scale. Investors noticed the pairing. Backer Mike Chalfen described the two as combining "incredibly fast learning and excellent operational discipline." The company raised a $9M Series A led by Point Nine Capital, then an $18M round led by Chalfen Ventures aimed squarely at rebuilding marketing signals for brands as third-party cookies disappear.

Democratizing the data giants take for granted

The ambition Dokes talks about is leveling a playing field. Large retailers have entire teams and budgets devoted to knowing exactly what is happening across every channel. A ten-person brand selling on Shopify does not, and historically that meant flying partly blind. Polar's stated mission is to democratize that enterprise-grade infrastructure so any brand can compete on data, regardless of size or where it sells.

Headquartered in Paris but built for a global market, Polar counts the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Australia among its biggest markets, and has processed billions of dollars in merchandise volume and ad spend on behalf of its merchants. As the company scaled past forty people across two continents, Dokes has been open about the parts of founding that are less about product and more about people - hiring, culture, and holding a fast-growing team together. The next chapter he keeps returning to is agents: software that does not just surface a brand's first-party data but acts on it.