The question "what can you actually buy with it" has a boring answer, and Bitrefill is the boring answer: mobile credit, gift cards for shops that already exist, eSIMs, and utility bills.
The legal entity is Airfill Prepaid AB, Swedish company number 559001-6035, registered in Stockholm. The founding year is stated two ways by the company itself. Its own funding announcement says "Founded in 2015, by Sergej Kotliar and co-founders Michael Grünberger and Michel Gustavsson", while the current about page carries the line "Trusted since 2014". Both are cited above and the earlier explicit statement is the one recorded here.
The Lightning history is the part worth having on record. Bitrefill's own account is that in 2017 it identified Lightning as the most viable route to scalable payments and made it a company focus, that it was first to market accepting Lightning payments, and that it remains the largest commercial participant on the network. Those are the company's claims about itself, not an independent measurement, and the last one in particular is not something an outsider can check. What is checkable is the tooling it shipped. In 2019 it launched Thor and Thor Turbo, which sold inbound channel capacity to people who could not otherwise receive, and then ThorAPI so that other platforms could open channels and manage capacity programmatically. Inbound liquidity was the practical blocker for anyone trying to get paid over Lightning in that period, and selling it as a product was an unglamorous fix for a real problem.
Today the storefront accepts Lightning and on-chain Bitcoin alongside several other assets, which is worth knowing if the reason you are reading this entry is that you want a Bitcoin-only supplier. Listing here is not endorsement. The company also runs a card product and store credit, and it publishes its press appearances rather than a press kit.