Klarna

Klarna is a Swedish e-commerce company that provides payment services for online storefronts. Their core service is to assume stores' claims for payments and handle customer payments, thus eliminating the risk for seller and buyer. About 20% of all e-commerce sales in Sweden goes through Klarna. The company has more than 1200 employees, most of them working at the headquarters in Stockholm.

History

In 2005, the three founders Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson participated in the Stockholm School of Economics annual entrepreneurship award with their idea on how to provide consumers and merchants with safer and simpler online shopping payment methods. However, their idea was not received with enthusiasm and their entry was among the last in the competition. Despite this, they decided to found Klarna in the middle of 2005 and started operations in Sweden.

In the end of 2007, venture capital firm Investment AB Öresund invested in the company.

Three years later, Klarna started selling their services in Norway, Finland and Denmark.

In 2010, Klarna also started providing services in Germany and the Netherlands, and in May the same year, San Francisco-based Sequoia Capital entered as investors.

During 2010, Klarna increased their revenues by over 80% to 54 Million USD (~400m SEK). In early 2011, The UK magazine The Telegraph listed Klarna as one of Europe’s 100 most promising young tech companies.

In 2011, growth equity firm General Atlantic led a $155M investment round joined by DST Global, and General Atlantic’s managing director Anton Levy joined the board of directors.

In May 2011, Klarna acquired the Israeli company Analyzd, with business activity on markets in Europe, Israel and the United States. Analyzd specialise in risk management and online payments, and its founders previously worked for PayPal.

In 2012, Klarna began offering services in Austria and Sweden.

In 2013, Klarna and German SOFORT AG merged after Klarna acquired SOFORT Banking from the majority shareholder Reimann Investors. Both companies would continue to offer their products side by side and operate on a stand-alone basis.

Technology

Klarna’s code base is written in Erlang, a programming language designed by Ericsson designed for highly parallel, scalable applications.

Market

Klarna operates locally in 18 countries; Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, France, UK, Italy, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and the US. Some of the largest competitors with similar product portfolios in these geographies include Swedish PayEx, German BillPay GmbH and Dutch AfterPay.