Klarna
Swedish fintech company
Klarna Group plc is a Swedish financial technology company and digital bank. Founded in 2005 in Stockholm, Sweden, Klarna provides digital payments, short-term consumer credit, cards, banking services and merchant tools for online and in-store commerce. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and is best known for buy now, pay later payment products.
Klarna Bank AB, the group's Swedish banking subsidiary, is authorized as a bank and supervised by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority. It provides financial services in the European Economic Area under European Union banking rules as well as areas outside the EEA, including in the United States and the United Kingdom, through local subsidiaries. As of 2026, Klarna reported more than 119 million active consumers, more than one million merchants, 3.4 million transactions per day and operations across 26 countries.
History
Founding and early years
Klarna was founded in 2005 by Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson after the founders developed an idea for simplifying online payments. The company was initially known as Kreditor and was supported by SSE Business Lab, the Stockholm School of Economics' start-up incubator. The early business idea centered around allowing consumers to receive goods before paying by taking on the role of credit and fraud risk for merchants.
Angel investor Jane Walerud became an early backer of the company, offering the founders SEK 600,000 for 10% of the company after seeing the idea presented and later connecting them with developers who helped build the platform.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Klarna” as swedish fintech company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as swedish fintech company. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1165072. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2005 and 2026.
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This entry incorporates text from “Klarna” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.