Klarna Group plc

Founding and early years

Klarna was founded in 2005 by Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson after the founders developed an idea for simplifying online payments. The company was initially known as Kreditor and was supported by SSE Business Lab, the Stockholm School of Economics ' start-up incubator. The early business idea centered around allowing consumers to receive goods before paying by taking on the role of credit and fraud risk for merchants.

Angel investor Jane Walerud became an early backer of the company, offering the founders SEK 600,000 for 10% of the company after seeing the idea presented and later connecting them with developers who helped build the platform. Erlang programming language was utilized in Klarna's early technical architecture, a point associated with Walerud's background at Erlang Systems.

In 2007, Investment AB Öresund invested in the company. [ citation needed ] Klarna subsequently expanded outside Sweden, first to Norway, Finland and Denmark, and later to Germany and the Netherlands. In 2009, the company changed the Kreditor name to Klarna.

Expansion, acquisitions and banking license

In 2010, Sequoia Capital invested in Klarna. In 2011, Klarna was listed by The Daily Telegraph among Europe's promising young technology companies. In May 2011, Klarna acquired Analyzd, an Israeli company specializing in online payments, risk management and fraud prevention. Later that year, General Atlantic led a $155 million investment round, joined by DST Global, to accelerate international expansion.

Klarna Checkout was launched in 2012 as an embedded checkout product for online merchants. By 2024, the product had a 40% market share in Sweden and over 20% across the Nordic region before the company sold the business that same year.

In 2013, Klarna acquired German online payments company SOFORT AG, operator of Sofortüberweisung, forming Klarna Group.

Klarna launched in the United States in 2015, which became one of the company's main growth markets. In the same year, Sweden's then Minister for Enterprise and Innovation, Mikael Damberg, described Klarna as one of Sweden's five "unicorn" technology companies, alongside Spotify, Mojang, Skype and King.

In June 2017, Klarna received a full banking license from the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority. In 2018, the company acquired Close Brothers Retail Finance in the United Kingdom, strengthening its UK retail finance position.

In 2019, Klarna raised $460 million in a funding round that valued the company at $5.5 billion, making it one of Europe's highest valued financial technology companies at the time. In 2020, Ant Financial, the financial affiliate of Alibaba Group, acquired a minority stake in Klarna as part of a partnership with the Swedish company.

2020s

In June 2021, a funding round led by SoftBank 's Vision Fund 2 valued Klarna at about $46 billion, making it one of the world's most valuable private fintech companies. In July 2021, Klarna acquired APPRL, a Stockholm-based influencer marketing software company, as part of its expansion into retailer marketing services. In the same month, it acquired Stocard, a mobile wallet app for loyalty cards, which was later integrated into the Klarna ecosystem.

Klarna expanded its card products in 2021 and 2022. It launched a physical Klarna Card in the UK in January 2022 and later launched a card product in the United States, supported by Marqeta. In 2022, it completed the acquisition of PriceRunner, a Swedish price-comparison service, to expand its product discovery, price comparison and review tools.

In July 2022, amid falling technology valuations and rising interest rates, Klarna raised $800 million at a valuation of $6.7 billion, about 85 percent below its 2021 valuation. In 2024, Klarna launched Klarna Plus, a US subscription service priced at $7.99 per month that offered benefits such as waived One Time Card service fees, rewards points and partner discounts.

Klarna confidentially initiated the process for a US initial public offering in 2024 and filed a public registration statement in March 2025. It delayed IPO plans in April 2025 amid market volatility related to US tariff changes, before relaunching the offering later in the year.

In September 2025, Klarna completed its initial public offering in the United States. Its ordinary shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on 10 September 2025 under the ticker symbol KLAR. The offering comprised 34,311,274 ordinary shares at $40.00 per share, of which 5,000,000 were sold by Klarna and the remainder by selling shareholders. In November 2025, Klarna announced KlarnaUSD, a US dollar-backed stablecoin intended for everyday and cross-border payments. The company said the token was live on the Tempo blockchain testnet and was expected to launch on Tempo's mainnet in 2026.

In July 2026, Swedish court ordered Google to pay the company $1.97 billion in damages after Klarna won an antitrust case alleging that Google engaged in anticompetitive practices. Klarna’s price-comparison unit, PriceRunner, sued Google in 2022, accusing Google of giving preferential treatment to its own price-comparison service in its search results. The same month, Klarna applied to establish an FDIC-insured bank in Utah, which would be its own American banking subsidiary if approved; a bank charter would expand Klarna's traditional banking products and bring lending and merchant operations in-house, "reducing its dependence on third-party banking partners".

In July 2026 it was announced that Klarna partnered with Apple for the new Apple Upgrade service, which allows eligible customers to lease select Apple devices, with Klarna acting as the financial backer and leasing provider of the program.