SoftBank’s investment helps Klarna make a $ 45.6 billion valuation

Klarna has raised its valuation by 50 percent to $ 45.6 billion in three months as the newly acquired company raises new capital from Japan’s SoftBank.

New assessment $ 31 billion in March and $ 11 billion last September – The Swedish team establishes the status of the most valuable private fintech company in Europe.

SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 led $ 639 million in revenue and joins Silver Lake, China’s Ant Group, H&M and Sequoia Capital’s investors ahead of the initial public offering presented in the coming years.

“The growth of clarity is based on an in-depth understanding of how consumer buying behavior is changing, an evolution that we believe is accelerating,” said Yanni Pipilis, senior partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers.

Unlike SoftBank’s Vision Fund 1, which largely financed foreign money, much of the Middle East, the second Vision Fund, is made up of money from a Japanese investment group.

Last month, Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank, said it would increase funding for the company’s Vision Fund 2 from $ 10,000 to $ 30 billion, while the Japanese group increased investment in private companies around the world.

Klarna is rapidly pushing the U.S. and telling investors that the American business will soon be “several times larger than our current business,” according to material seen by the Financial Times. The volume of payments processed by Klarna in the U.S. rose 296 percent in the fourth quarter, according to the same information provided to potential investors.

CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told the Financial Times on Thursday that Klarna saw a particularly high opportunity in the U.S. because of the “overuse” of credit cards and the move by millennials to rely more on debit cards.

Klarna, which is regulated as a bank in Sweden, is positioning itself as a “super app” that consumers use not only for payments but also for purchases and retail banking.

However, it is facing challenges with an increasing political and regulatory scrutiny of purchasing. After worries about whether companies encourage consumers to buy goods they can’t afford.

He had applications of clarity problems on May 27, about 90,000 users were able to briefly view information from other customers, including in some cases their name, address, email, and phone number.

Siemiatkowski said what had happened “to himself” earlier was “very sad and disappointing” and drew the attention of data protection regulators.

Siemiatkowski has just returned from the UK as Klarna remains a possible listing on the London Stock Exchange, although the US still seems to be a favorite.

He continued sing praises The UK and Londoners said he was “very impressed and really impressed” with what he saw in London. He criticized the “really bad” regulations passed by the EU and said the UK had a “tremendous opportunity” to become a global center for fintech. “There is awareness and interest in this issue,” he added.

Klarna is now on Spotify, much larger than the music playback service created in Stockholm, and Nordea, far from the largest bank in the Nordic countries.

Siemiatkowski said the profits from SoftBank and others could be used for purchases, while going public would make sense not to raise capital, but to provide “liquidity” to employees with stock options and “perhaps want more M&A.” But he added that he is “a little nervous” about the parking lot of the markets today: “None of us are in a hurry.”

Additional report by Miles Kruppa in San Francisco and Arash Massoud in London