Klarna

Overview

Acquisitions: 3 Acquisitions
Total Equity Funding: $296.44M in 8 Rounds from 16 Investors
Headquarters: Stockholm, Stockholms Lan
Description: Klarna provides e-commerce payment solutions for merchants and shoppers.
Founders: Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Victor Jacobsson, Niklas Adalberth.
Categories: E-Commerce, Financial Services, FinTech, Payments
Website: http://www.klarna.com

Company Details

Founded: February 11, 2005
Contact: info@klarna.com
Employees: 1k – 5k | 14 in Crunchbase

Klarna has become the most elegant, checkout usher for commerce websites all over Europe. Shoppers and merchants know that Klarna makes life – and payments – easier than ever. And what greases the wheels of e-commerce in Europe will make for a wonderful and important company.” – Michael Moritz, Sequoia Capital 2011.

Klarna is one of Europe’s leading providers of payment solutions for e-commerce. Klarna separates buying from paying by allowing buyers to pay for ordered goods after receiving them, providing them with a safe after delivery payment solution. At the same time, Klarna assumes all credit and fraud risk for e-stores so that sellers can rest assured that they will always receive their money. Klarna’s vision is to enable trust and to offer a frictionless buying experience to buyers and sellers across the world.

Data driven – Klarna’s business model relies on only charging for approved purchases, which means that Klarna always work towards increasing stores’ sales. Klarna, with its millions of customers, is data-driven and a leading company within decision science. Using data that has been gathered through millions of purchases throughout the years, Klarna can create accurate algorithms that enables the highest acceptance rate on the market.

Klarna has been able to take advantage of the benefits of Erlang when developing its services. Erlang has been a key success factor from the start where the symbolic nature of the programming language made it possible to get the first working version up and running in a few months time. Erlang’s ability to leverage multi core technology has also made it possible to scale the system through an exponential growth in transactions with little effort. Klarna has also benefited from the ability to upgrade code in a running Erlang system and the many features for supervision and for building high availability systems.

Background – Klarna was founded in 2005 in Stockholm, Sweden by the three students Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson who were at the time studying together at the Stockholm School of Economics. They started the company with the vision of making shopping online simpler, safer and more fun. Market leading in its Swedish home market, Klarna has rapidly expanded throughout Europe and today offers its payment solutions to online shops and consumers in six countries. In spring 2011, Klarna acquired the Israeli risk analysis company Analyzd, and Klarna’s seventh office opened in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Funding – In May 2010, Klarna secured its second round of funding worth $9 million from Sequoia Capital. Following this, Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz joined the Klarna board of directors. Moritz has previously been involved in investments into Google and YouTube for example. In late 2011, Klarna announced its third round of venture capital funding, which was led by DST and General Atlantic worth a stunning $155 million. DST and General Atlantic have previously invested in successful web companies such as Facebook, Zynga and Twitter.