Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski. Photo credit: picture alliance/Tobias Hase, under Creative Commons license

Klarna, a Swedish ‘buy now, pay later’ upstart has raised $650 million in new equity funding that values the company at $10.7 billion post-money. The new funding was led by Silver Lake, a tech-focused private equity firm. Investors including Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, GIC, as well as BlackRock and HMI Capital also chipped into the round. Additionally, investors including Merian Chrysalis, TCV, Northzone, and Bonnier have acquired stakes in Klarna from existing shareholders in a secondary round, joining a sizeable list of institutional and venture shareholders in Klarna. Klarna says it’ll use the new funding to grow its global presence and accelerate its service its existing markets, particularly in the US where it has more than 9 million customers.

It’s such that Klarna’s valuation makes it the highest-valued private fintech in the whole of Europe and one of the highest-valued globally. With the new funding, Klarna has now raised a total of more than $2 billion in funding since its inception. Klarna primarily provides a ‘buy now, pay later’ service that lets people borrow to shop online and pay back to Klarna in installments. Klarna directly partners with retailers to offer its service rather than work directly with consumers. Currently, the company has more than 200,000 retail partners and 90 million customers. It’s such that the coronavirus pandemic has undoubtedly helped Klarna’s business, with over 35,000 retail partners added in the first half of this year alone.

For the first half of this year, Klarna recorded $466 million in revenues on a shopping volume of $22 billion. Klarna runs its operations with more than 3,500 employees spread across 17 countries globally. The Swedish company was founded 15 years ago. 

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