The Swedish fintech is preparing its US IPO, featuring part-originating shares and notable investors, reflecting its evolving valuation.
On Sept. 2, Klarna received long-awaited approval to list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The Swedish fintech company has launched its initial public offering (IPO), offering 34,311,274 ordinary shares. Of these, 5,555,556 are offered by Klarna itself, while 28,755,718 are offered by existing shareholders identified in the F-1 registration statement.
The largest shareholder is the US-based venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. According to Swedish business daily Dagens Industri, the biggest single sale is being made by Klarna’s second-largest owner, Danish entrepreneur Anders Holch Povlsen, who is expected to receive at least SEK 2.1 billion (€191m). Klarna co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski is not among the selling shareholders. His stake is currently valued at approximately SEK 11 billion (approx. €1bn).
The Swedish fintech company was founded in 2005 by Siemiatkowski and two of his classmates, Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson, while they were studying at the Stockholm School of Economics (Handelshögskolan/HSS), considered by many to be the most prestigious business university in Scandinavia. The start-up was incubated at SSE Business Lab, the school’s entrepreneurship hub. The rest is a fintech fairy tale, and today, 20 years later, Klarna has approximately 790,000 merchants and 111 million active consumers globally.
Klarna is valued at around SEK 130 billion (€11.8bn). While this is still a considerable sum, it is significantly lower than the peak value of $45.6 billion (SEK 485bn at the then exchange rate) in 2021. In a financing round in 2022, the valuation had fallen to SEK 71.5 billion (€6.5bn). Compared to Spotify, another Swedish tech company, Klarna is relatively small. Daniel Ek’s New York-listed streaming service has a market capitalization of approximately SEK 1,335 billion (€12.1bn).
The offering price is expected to range between $35 and $37 per share, which will provide the company with approximately SEK 11.7 billion (€1.1bn). This represents an 83 percent sell-off of existing owners’ shares in the offering. The offering is subject to an underwriters’ 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 5,146,691 shares to cover over-allotments. Klarna will not receive proceeds from the shares sold by existing shareholders. An additional 5,146,691 shares may be issued under a 30-day over-allotment option. The stock will trade under the ticker symbol “KLAR.”
Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley are joint book-running managers, with several other banks acting as bookrunners and co-managers.
