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Klarna
Klarna Group plc, commonly referred to as Klarna, is a Swedish fintech company that provides online financial services. The company provides payment processing services for the e-commerce industry, managing store claims and customer payments. The company is a "buy now, pay later" service provider. The company has more than 5,000 employees, most of them working at the headquarters in Stockholm and offices in Berlin. In 2021, the company handled about US$80 billion in online sales. Klarna initially planned to file as an American IPO in April 2025 and was projected to be valued at $15 billion. This valuation was about one-third of its peak of $45.6 billion in 2021. Klarna delayed their IPO filing as a result of the 2025 United States trade war with Canada and Mexico. History The three founders Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson founded Klarna in 2005 after participating in the Stockholm School of Economics annual entrepreneurship competition. Ange ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sebastian Siemiatkowski
Sebastian Siemiatkowski (also spelled Sebastian Siemiątkowski; born 3 October 1981) is a Swedish entrepreneur who is the co-founder and chief executive officer of fintech company Klarna. In 2022, his net worth was estimated at $3.2 billion as Klarna's valuation increased although he is (as of 2025) no longer a billionaire. Early life Siemiatkowski's parents moved to Uppsala from Poland in the 1980s. He was born on 3 October 1981 in Sweden but his older sister was born in Poland. Siemiatkowski considers himself as a second generation immigrant. His early influences were Richard Branson and Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA. Siemiatkowski credits the Swedish digital policy of subsidizing the ownership of computers for his success because it allowed his family to acquire their first computer. Education and career Siemiatkowski attended high school at Katedralskolan, Uppsala. He holds a master's degree from the Stockholm School of Economics. He started building Klarna at age 23 and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Buy Now, Pay Later
Buy now, pay later (BNPL) is a type of short-term financing that allows consumers to make purchases while only initially paying for a portion of their value, postponing payment of the remainder of the debt until a future date, or dividing it into a series of installment payments. BNPL is generally structured like a hire purchase or installment plan money lending process that involves consumers, financiers, and merchants. Financiers pay merchants on behalf of the consumers when goods or services are purchased by the latter. These payments are later repaid by the consumers over time in equal installments. The number of installments and the repayment period vary, depending on the BNPL financier. History The earliest form of BNPL traces back to the 19th century, when installment plans emerged as a way for consumers to purchase expensive goods (e.g. furniture, pianos and farm equipment) they did not have the funds to buy outright. Earlier examples and similar concepts Sources discu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Niklas Adalberth
Gustav Erik Niklas Adalberth (born 1981) is a Swedish entrepreneur and philanthropist, known as a co-founder of Klarna and the founder of Norrsken Foundation, a social impact organization founded in 2016. Biography Adalberth was born and raised in Gottsunda parish, Uppsala, Sweden. During junior high school, he made money by forging identification cards and government coupons before he was discovered. He was an exchange student in Connecticut for a year. Before starting his studies, he traveled and worked in Switzerland, among other places. He graduated from the Stockholm School of Economics, where with his childhood friends Sebastian Siemiatkowski and Victor Jacobsson, he founded the finance company Klarna in 2005. He left his operational role at Klarna in 2015 and subsequently founded the Norrsken Foundation. Norrsken Foundation In June 2016, Adalberth founded the Norrsken foundation. At the beginning of 2017, Norrsken opened the doors to the Norrsken House office hot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jane Walerud
Jane Christine Walerud Boreta (born 13 November 1961) is a Sweden-based entrepreneur and investor. She has been involved in over 15 startups since the early 2000s, including Klarna, Bluetail, Tobii Technology, Teclo Networks, and GraphMaTech. She is member of The Swedish Government Innovation Council. Early life Walerud was born in the US and moved to Sweden when she was 20 years old after meeting her husband, Bengt. She studied Cognitive Psychology and Computer Science at Stanford University. Jane and Bengt Walerud have a daughter, Caroline, who is also a private investor and entrepreneur. Career Walerud worked as a Sales Manager at Erlang Systems in 1997. She left in 1998 to co-found Bluetail, a company which developed all of its products in Erlang. It was then sold for $152 million to Alteon Networks. In 2004, she met Sebastian Siemiatkowski, founder of Klarna and invested €60,000 for 10% of the company. She also introduced the founders to a team of programmers who he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Moritz
Sir Michael Jonathan Moritz (born 12 September 1954) is a Welsh billionaire venture capitalist, philanthropist, author, and former journalist. Moritz works for Sequoia Capital, wrote the first history of Apple Inc., '' The Little Kingdom'', and authored ''Going for Broke: Lee Iacocca's Battle to Save Chrysler''. Previously, Moritz was a staff writer at ''Time'' magazine and a member of the board of directors of Google. He studied at the University of Oxford and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and went on to found Technologic Partners before becoming a venture capitalist in the 1980s. Moritz was named as the No. 1 venture capitalist on the ''Forbes'' Midas List in 2006 and 2007. Early life and education Michael Jonathan Moritz was born to a Jewish family in Cardiff, Wales, on 12 September 1954. His father, Ludwig Alfred Moritz (1921–2003), was a Jew who fled Nazi Germany. A professor of Classics at Cardiff University, in the 1970s, he became its Vic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California, specializing in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. the firm had approximately US$85 billion in assets under management. Sequoia is an umbrella brand for three regionally focused venture entities: Sequoia Capital Operations on Europe and United States, Peak XV Partners on India and Southeast Asia, and HongShan on China. Notable successful investments made by the firm include Apple, ByteDance, and Cisco. History Sequoia was founded by Don Valentine in 1972 in Menlo Park, California, at a time when the state's venture capital industry was just beginning to develop. Sequoia formed its first venture capital fund in 1974, and was an early investor in Atari the next year. In 1978, Sequoia became one of the first investors in Apple. Partners Doug Leone and Michael Moritz assumed leadership of the firm in 199 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stockholm School Of Economics
The Stockholm School of Economics (SSE; , HHS) is a private business school located in city district Vasastaden in the central part of Stockholm, Sweden. SSE offers BSc, MSc and MBA programs, along with PhD- and Executive education programs. SSE is accredited by EQUIS and is a member of CEMS. SSE has founded sister organizations: SSE Riga in Riga, Latvia, and SSE Russia in St Petersburg and Moscow, Russia. It also operates ''the European Institute of Japanese Studies ''( Japanese, kanji: 欧州日本研究所,'' ''Japanese, romaji: Ōshū Nihon kenkyūjo), a research institute in Tokyo, Japan. History The banker Knut Agathon Wallenberg donated 100 000 SEK in 1903 (Equivalent to around 7 million SEK in 2023) to lobby for founding a business school in Stockholm. Wallenberg considered that "It was important to raise the social status of the merchant class". Lobbying was necessary because the classical tradition in western thought has a long-standing disdain for comme ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stockholm
Stockholm (; ) is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, most populous city of Sweden, as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in the Nordic countries. Approximately 1 million people live in the Stockholm Municipality, municipality, with 1.6 million in the Stockholm urban area, urban area, and 2.5 million in the Metropolitan Stockholm, metropolitan area. The city stretches across fourteen islands where Mälaren, Lake Mälaren flows into the Baltic Sea. Outside the city to the east, and along the coast, is the island chain of the Stockholm archipelago. The area has been settled since the Stone Age, in the 6th millennium BC, and was founded as a city in 1252 by Swedish statesman Birger Jarl. The city serves as the county seat of Stockholm County. Stockholm is the cultural, media, political, and economic centre of Sweden. The Stockholm region alone accounts for over a third of the country's Gros ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Unicorn (finance)
In business, a unicorn is a startup company Valuation (finance), valued at over US$1 billion which is privately owned and not listed on a share market. The term was first published in 2013, coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, choosing the unicorn, mythical animal to represent the statistical rarity of such successful ventures. Many unicorns saw their valuations fall in 2022 as a result of an economic slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, an increase in interest rates causing the cost of borrowing to grow, increased market volatility (finance), volatility, stricter regulatory scrutiny and underperformance. CB Insights identified 1,248 unicorns worldwide . Unicorns with over $10 billion in valuation have been designated as "decacorn" companies. For private companies valued over $100 billion, the terms "centicorn" and "hectocorn" have been used. History Aileen Lee originated the term "unicorn" in a 2013 ''TechCrunch'' article, "Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Privately Held Company
A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose Stock, shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in their respective listed markets. Instead, the Private equity, company's stock is offered, owned, traded or exchanged privately, also known as "over-the-counter (finance), over-the-counter". Related terms are unlisted organisation, unquoted company and private equity. Private companies are often less well-known than their public company, publicly traded counterparts but still have major importance in the world's economy. For example, in 2008, the 441 list of largest private non-governmental companies by revenue, largest private companies in the United States accounted for $1.8 trillion in revenues and employed 6.2 million people, according to ''Forbes''. In general, all companies that are not owned by the government are classified as private enterprises. This definition encompasses both publ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DST Global
DST Global is a venture capital and private equity firm that primarily invests in late-stage internet companies. DST Global has been described as one of the largest and most influential venture firms in the world, with an estimated $50 billion in assets under management. DST Global's founder is Yuri Milner and its co-founders are Saurabh Gupta, John Lindfors, Rahul Mehta, Tom Stafford, and Alexander Tamas. The company was founded in 2009 as a spinoff from Russian company Digital Sky Technologies, which became Mail.ru Group (later the VK company). In the early 2010s, DST Global international investments were focused on emerging markets such as China. Background Yuri Milner founded Digital Sky Technologies (now known as VK) in 1999 that through acquisitions has become a leading Russian language website in terms of users. In 2010, Digital Sky Technologies changed its name to Mail.ru Group and successfully completed an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anton Levy
Anton Levy (born October 18, 1974) is an American businessman. He is co-president, managing director and chairman of Global Technology at General Atlantic, a private equity firm based in New York City, where he has worked since 1998. Levy has been on The Forbes Midas List nine times. In 2017, Forbes ranked Levy #26 on the Midas List, List. Career and education Anton Levy earned a Bachelor of Science in commerce with degrees in Finance and Computer Science from the University of Virginia, and a Master of Business Administration from Columbia University. Levy graduated from both with highest honors. Levy began his career in 1996 as an analyst and investment banker at Morgan Stanley, working with the investment bank's technology clients. In 1998 Levy joined growth equity firm General Atlantic, with a focus on internet and technology companies. Levy was promoted to managing director in 2006 and today oversees the firm's global Internet & Technology sector. He also serves on the f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
