Klarna’s time has finally come.
After postponing its plans to go public earlier this year, Swedish fintech company Klarna will IPO on Wednesday. The company—known for its buy now, pay later services—along with some of its existing shareholders will offer more than 34 million shares, priced at $40 a piece. That could give it an overall value of around $15 billion.
That’s a fall from the lofty $46 billion valuation it fetched four years ago at the height of the pandemic-fueled buy now, pay later rush. But despite the haircut, the company is on less frothy ground, and many investors are waiting with bated breath for the stock to start trading a full 20 years after it was founded.
That includes Mattias Ljungman, co-founder and Managing Partner at Moonfire, who was one of the earlier investors in Klarna. In 2012, Ljungman was a co-founder and partner at Atomico, which has grown into one of Europe’s largest venture funds, and led the company’s investment in Klarna during its Series E funding round—which pushed its valuation over $1 billion and into unicorn territory for the first time.
Ljungman tells Fast Company that now, nearly a decade and a half since he led that investment at Atomico, he remembers that the company’s founders were what initially attracted him to Klarna.
Founding attraction
“The main thing was the founders. They had some really exciting people with the capability to drive transformative change in the market. Sebastian [Siemiatkowski, Klarna’s co-founder and CEO] had it in spades—he’s relentless, tenacious, passionate, and he was fixated on his vision,” Ljungman says. “That’s what was really remarkable, the ability to have that kind of focus.”
He adds that the company’s other co-founders, Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson, shared those traits as well, adding that they were and remain “great people and great operators.”
“What was cool was the opportunity that they saw—most people, when they think about payments, they think Visa or Mastercard. These are huge businesses, and they built out the rails for payment processing,” he says. “What Klarna did was build out a separate set of rails for commerce.”
What’s next for Klarna
Ljungman sees Klarna—which has become fairly ubiquitous as a payment option in many parts of the world—as a viable third player against the likes of Visa and Mastercard. For merchants, too, using Klarna has some advantages over those two. Specifically, he says, it gives them more insight into the behavior and purchase history of customers, allowing for targeted marketing efforts, and it can also help facilitate more sales by offering consumers a choice other than cash or using a card. “It’s become a sort of conversion engine for merchants, he says. “It’s almost like an ROI machine.”
He also notes that the IPOs timing comes as the markets, and world at large, have largely come to terms with the wild new changes and economic policies being implemented in the United States. The Trump administration’s “Liberation Day” tariffs were a big reason the initial IPO date was pushed back, but now that the dust has settled, and other companies—like Circle and Figma—have also gone public, Klarna’s leadership likely feels like this is the time to push ahead.
“In some ways, it’s a celebration of tech companies and the global belief in those companies. If anything, it proves the strength of the tech ecosystem,” he says.
As for Klarna’s next big challenge? It’s probably going to be breaking through in the U.S., where the company has just recently started to ramp up its efforts. That will take time and considerable resources, Ljungman warns, but having seen what the company has been able to do in other markets, he wouldn’t bet against success.
“I’ve seen that in market after market, they become really successful,” he says. “Every time, they’ve nailed it.”
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