One of the most interesting and potentially most disruptive technology companies to come out of Sweden is Klarna, the heavily funded fintech venture whose mission is to 'simplify buying' online for both consumers and merchants - and remove banks as middlemen in the process.
As part of my whirlwind tour of Stockholm startups, I really wanted to catch a glimpse of Klarna's offices, a few months after the company raised 90 million euros to finance its big-bet acquisition of Germany's Sofort and only weeks before a planned relocation to new facilities (which it will share with Candy Crush Saga maker King, by the way).
Before they move into the new HQ, however, I visited Klarna's offices in downtown - and exciting - Stockholm to sit down and share lunch with its co-founder and CEO, the affable Sebastian Siemiatkowski.
You can watch a brief video interview above, in which he discusses Klarna's solutions, geographic availability, the recent Sofort acquisition, a potential IPO and the Stockholm startup scene.
Klarna: some facts and figures
Klarna has more than 1,000 employees today and is active in 15 markets, serving more than 25 million consumers and more than 50,000 (mostly online) merchants. It currently handles more than 200,000 transactions per day, and that number is growing consistently as time progresses.
Consumers can simply use Klarna to simply and safely buy goods online (although they might not even realize they're using the company's solutions for it), while merchants can pick between three services depending on their needs: Klarna Checkout (the most popular by a long shot), Klarna Invoice and Klarna Account. As you can imagine, more products are currently under development.
Klarna was founded in 2005 is backed by Sequoia Capital (whose chairman Michael Moritz is also on the company's board), Atomico, General Atlantic, Digital Sky Technologies and other investors.
Here are more video interviews featuring Stockholm's finest tech entrepreneurs:
iZettle bags 40 million euros in Series C funding: a chat with CEO Jacob de Geer
A visit to Teenage Engineering, the lean music hardware startup run out of a garage
(All images and the video above credit to tech.eu)
Would you like to write the first comment?
Login to post comments