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Swedish fintech Klarna took the next step in its extremely hoped-for U.S. initial offering on Friday when it made itsF-1prospectus populace . We are sifting through the text file now .
Klarna hopes to raise at least $ 1 billion at a $ 15 billion valuation with this IPO , Bloomberg reported last hebdomad . The public documents do n’t yet reveal how many shares it plans to sell or the monetary value range of a function , so we wo n’t know if this IPO will come across its fundraising aspirations or not until it prices shares . That ’s typically around a month , sometimes more , after the prospectus documents are made public for everyone to chew on .
However , this IPO has been anticipated for age now so perhaps its banker have some meter reading that investors will bite at that tier .
One rationality could be that Klarna ’s previous individual valuation recentlyrebounded to $ 14.6 billion , according to reports , after one investor increase its interest . Another could be that Klarna is report a profit . Specifically , Klarna report revenue of $ 2.8 billion for 2024 , up from around $ 2.3 billion in 2023 . It also reported a net profit of $ 21 million in 2024 , a big swing from a red in 2023 of -$244 million .
Founded in 2005 by its current CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski , Klarna isone of several playersthat offer buy now , pay later funding to customer for purchases . Afterlaunching in the U.S.in 2015 , Klarna hit a hefty evaluation ofmore than $ 45 billionby 2021 , a bod that swiftlyplummeted by 85 % to $ 6.5 billionwhen the 2021 venture upper-case letter valuation house of cards burst .
Klarna has recently been make news for produce its own in - house AI system base onOpenAI ’s ChatGPTand sound out that it drop its contract bridge for Salesforce CRM to use its internal system rather .
Siemiatkowski said its homegrown ChatGPT - powered customer divine service botled to replacing 700 full - time contractemployees and a savings of approximately $ 40 million every year . He even went so far as to say that Klarna kibosh hiring aggressively because of its use of AI , letting itsworkforce dwindlefrom 5,000 in 2023 to about 3,500 by the ending of 2024 .
