Klarna

Klarna listed on the NYSE in September 2025 at $40 a share, a roughly $19B valuation. It was the largest US IPO of the year. The stock has fallen about 65% since, trading near $14 by late 2025 / early 2026. That arc, more than any one operating number, is the lasting story of Klarna’s first public year.

The numbers themselves are still huge. FY2025 GMV reached $127.9B (+22% YoY) on $3.5B revenue (+25%). Q4 2025 cleared $1.082B in revenue, the company’s first ever billion-dollar quarter (+38% YoY). Active consumers grew 28% to 118M. Merchants grew 42% to 966,000. The 2026 guidance is $155B+ GMV and roughly $4.34B revenue.

What spooked the market: a $26M Q4 swing into loss, with loan-loss provisions surging as Klarna pushed deeper into installment lending; weak forward guidance; and four senior executive departures since January 2026. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has stated publicly that AI will shrink the headcount from around 3,000 to roughly 2,000 by 2030, an unusually direct admission for a CEO right after an IPO.

A Nordic-coded fact most coverage misses: Klarna’s top company is now Klarna Group plc, a UK plc, after a corporate redomicile completed for the NYSE listing. That quietly moved the parent away from Stockholm. The operating teams remain Swedish, and the Stockholm headcount is still the centre of gravity, but the legal centre of gravity is not.

For the directory the lesson is that the Klarna 2.0 narrative — flagship Nordic fintech, public-market reference for the entire region’s BNPL category — is now a story of post-IPO discipline rather than pre-IPO scale. Whether the 2026 guidance holds, and whether the AI-driven headcount reduction stops at 2,000, is the read everyone in the cohort below it is now watching.