Buy now, pay later lender Klarna files for U.S. IPO

• Klarna filed its IPO prospectus on Friday and plans to go public on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol KLAR.
• Klarna’s top competitors include Affirm and Afterpay, which is owned by Block.
• Block, Affirm and PayPal are each bolstering their portfolios of financial products, including debit, lending and payment offerings, as they try to capture more consumer attention and spending.

Klarna, headquartered in Sweden, hasn’t yet disclosed the number of shares to be offered or the expected price range.

The decision to go public in the U.S. deals a significant blow to European stock exchanges, which have struggled to retain homegrown tech companies. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski had hinted for years that a U.S. listing was more likely, citing better visibility and regulatory advantages.

Klarna is continuing to rebuild after a dramatic downturn. Once a pandemic-era darling valued at $46 billion in a SoftBank-led funding round, Klarna saw its valuation slashed by 85% in 2022, plummeting to $6.7 billion in its most recent primary fundraising. However, analysts now estimate the company’s valuation in the $15 billion range, bolstered by its return to profitability in 2023.

Revenue last year increased 24% to $2.8 billion. The company’s operating loss was $121 million for the year, and adjusted operating profit was $181 million, swinging from a loss of $49 million a year earlier.

Klarna is the latest upstart to file for a U.S. IPO as tech companies look to hit the public market following a historically slow stretch for new offerings. Earlier this month, CoreWeave, a provider of cloud-based Nvidia processors to companies including Meta and Microsoft, filed its prospectus.

Cloud software vendor ServiceTitan hit the market in December, marking the first significant venture-backed tech IPO since Rubrik’s

 debut in April. A month before that, Reddit

 started trading on the NYSE. There haven’t been many other tech IPOs of note in the U.S. since late 2021, when rising interest rates and soaring inflation pushed investors out of risky assets.