W.If Sebastian Siemiatkowski didn’t come to the port too late back then, who knows whether Klarna would even exist today. The Swedish online payment service provider is Europe’s most valuable start-up company, valued at a staggering 46 billion dollars after the entry of a number of other investors in the summer. The key figures of the past few years are pointing upwards with a straight arrow, with dynamic growth in all relevant directions: Swedes count 90 million private individuals and 250,000 dealers among their customers, the latest annual report shows revenues of around 1 billion dollars. For payment processing on the Internet, which Klarna started with, offers such as your own credit card, giro and time deposit accounts have long since arrived.
All of this makes Klarna a bankruptcy. And Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the founder, who has just turned 40, has become a star of the fintech scene, which is shaking up the financial industry with clever algorithms and smart apps. For a long time, bets have been running on when he will put Klarna on the stock exchange; nothing precise can be extracted from it. Shares in his much smaller private equity firm, Flat Capital, on the other hand, which relies on the start-ups of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, have been available for sale on the Stockholm Stock Exchange since last week: they started at a price of 10 kroner each then to 36 kroner and are now at 24 kroner.
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