Straight Outta Sweden: Klarna’s $45B Hype, Its $7B Bottom, and the $14B IPO Test For Investors Today

Here we go again, another day and another IPO coming out hot in the fintech space. You can say a lot of things about fintechs and you can love ‘em or hate ‘em, but they are unbelievably good at sensing when the capital markets windows are open. At sniffing out the animal spirits if you will. So when they see that the market’s have gone from “it’s so over” to “we’re so back” and even up into the realms of “holy $hit, Chamath is SPAC’ing again” you know you’re about to see an IPO boom.

And the latest one hitting the newswires is Klarna, the Swedish-born fintech founded in Stockholm in 2005 that turned the ratchet old check out process of paying all your money up front into a smooth and flexible “buy now pay later” model. Shoppers love it. Merchants love it. But is this business model supportive of durable growth and margin expansion, or is it just another IPO to dump shares on retail bagholders.

Klarna’s mission is, like most fintechs, ambitious yet simple: help people save time, money, and reduce financial stress while helping merchants grow. And while they call themselves a “personalized, trusted assistant” what that means for us financial insiders is that they’d like to be the place you go to buy things. They offer BNPL with merchants paying the take rate so customers can get things interest free and spend more money at checkout. They offer “fair financing” which is basically just higher yield more credit card like offers. And they’re also building out an ecosystem around the payments rails including a card, savings accounts, loyalty features, and interestingly an ad network.

This IPO comes just after Affirm posted blow out revenue numbers, which I wrote up recently, and has ripped back to local highs after being left for dead in 2022 & 2023. So the question for you as investors is …

Should I buy this IPO?

Is the hype worth it?

Or should I wait to fade it like Victaurs said to on CRCL & CHYM?

And for that you’ll have to drop in behind the paywall.