Swedish payments firm Klarna has raised $639 million from a group of investors driven by SoftBank’s (Vision Asset II, lifting its valuation to about $46 billion – higher than most of the region’s significant banks.
Klarna, which permits customers to purchase online through its merchant partners and settle their dues instalmentally by means of “buy now, pay later” (BNPL), turned into Europe’s most important startup in March when a $1 billion fund raising valued it at $31 billion.
The current round was driven by SoftBank, joined by existing investors like Adit Adventures, Honeycomb Asset Management and WestCap Group.
Klarna’s different investors include Sequoia Capital, NorthZone, Silver Lake, Dragoneer, Permira, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Bestseller Group, Ant Group, rapper Snoop Dogg, BlackRock and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC.
Sources revealed last month that Klarna was about raising another round of financing at a valuation near $50 billion.
The company, whose CEO is Sebastian Siemiatkowski, is among the biggest player in the global BNPL sector with more than 90 million global dynamic customers, and processes 2 million transactions daily.
The company is expected to go public either this year or the next. Siemiatkowski disclosed that he is disposed toward direct listing as done by Spotify to take their company public.
“We are cheerful investors, and we could sell our shares tomorrow if we wish, so we don’t have any pressure to take the company public,” said Hans Otterling, a partner at venture capital firm Northzone, an early investor in Klarna.
Klarna, established in 2005, took eight years to arrive at a valuation of $1 billion, yet in just a year from being valued at $5.5 billion has grown to almost a valuation of $50 billion.
Alongside rivals like Affirm and Afterpay it has grown to be popular as the Covid pandemic drives a change in consumer spending on the internet.
