Klarna is owned by its public shareholders, but a small group of pre-IPO investors and founders holds most of the economic stake and nearly all of the voting power. Klarna Group plc is a UK-incorporated, Swedish-born payments and consumer credit company that listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker KLAR, with ordinary shares priced at $40.00 in its initial public offering prospectus filed September 10, 2025. Its largest shareholder is a group of funds affiliated with Sequoia Capital, which held 76,671,503 ordinary shares and about 23% of total voting rights according to Klarna's 2025 annual report on Form 20-F.
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Who owns Klarna is a question with two answers. One is about economics: who holds the ordinary shares that receive dividends and sale proceeds. The other is about control: who casts the votes. Klarna's multi-class share structure separates the two, so a list of holders by share count does not tell the whole story. This article uses Klarna's own SEC filings, the F-1 series prospectus and the first 20-F, to show both.
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Klarna is a publicly traded company whose largest owners are the venture and private investors who backed it before listing. Sequoia Capital's funds are the biggest holder, followed by Danish holding company Heartland, co-founders Victor Jacobsson and Sebastian Siemiatkowski, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Together these holders control a large minority of the ordinary shares. Source: Klarna's 2025 Form 20-F.
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Klarna files as a foreign private issuer, which means it reports on Form 20-F and Form 6-K rather than the 10-K and proxy statements used by US domestic companies. Its 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2025 lists every shareholder that beneficially owned 5% or more of its issued share capital. The table below reproduces those holders. The economic share column divides each holder's ordinary shares by the 377,507,910 ordinary shares that the same 20-F reports as outstanding at year-end 2025.
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Summed, these five holders own roughly 45.9% of the ordinary shares by the 20-F figures. The rest sits with other pre-IPO investors, employees, and public investors who bought in or after the offering. The voting percentages differ from the economic percentages because of Class B shares, covered below.
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Klarna was founded in Stockholm by three Stockholm School of Economics students: Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth, and Victor Jacobsson. The company began as a pay-after-delivery invoicing service for online shoppers, operated under the name Kreditor at first, and grew across the Nordics and Europe before expanding into the United States.
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Klarna's 20-F states the company "was founded in 2005 in Sweden" to improve trust in online commerce, initially letting consumers pay for goods after delivery. The founding trio and the original name Kreditor, later changed to Klarna in 2009, are documented on Klarna's Wikipedia entry. The same source records Sequoia's first investment in 2010.
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The three founders took different paths. Siemiatkowski still runs the company as Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, a role the 20-F describes as central enough that his loss is listed as a risk factor. Jacobsson remains a major shareholder, holding his stake through a set of Swedish holding companies such as Stenbranten Holding AB and Krokusvik Holding AB, as itemized in footnote 15 of the IPO prospectus. Adalberth appeared in the prospectus as a selling shareholder with 2,942,304 ordinary shares before the offering, per the 424B4 principal and selling shareholders table, well below the 5% disclosure threshold.
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Klarna's largest investors are Sequoia Capital, Heartland, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, with a second tier of funds that includes Silver Lake, GIC, BlackRock, Mubadala, Atomico, and Ant Group. Most of these holders sold part of their stake in the IPO but kept the majority of their shares.
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Sequoia's position is spread across more than half a dozen fund vehicles. The prospectus footnotes list Sequoia Capital GFIV Sweden, L.P. as the largest, with 34,177,680 ordinary shares, alongside Sequoia's Global Growth and US/E Expansion funds. Sequoia held 78,812,592 ordinary shares before the IPO and sold 1,820,842 in the base offering, per the 424B4. The ties extend to the board: Klarna chair Michael Moritz was a general partner at Sequoia until July 2023, and board member Andrew Reed is a current Sequoia general partner, according to the prospectus.
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Heartland is the private holding company of Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen. The 424B4 says Heartland holds its Klarna shares through a subsidiary called Aktieselskabet af 20.3.2020 and that Povlsen holds voting and dispositive power over them. Heartland owned 37,065,732 ordinary shares before the IPO and offered 6,304,349 in the base deal, per the same filing. The same footnote links board member Lise Kaae to Heartland.
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Commonwealth Bank of Australia is the one strategic banking investor above the 5% line. It held 19,341,372 ordinary shares before the offering, or 5.20% of ordinary shares, according to the prospectus table, and 17,407,235 after, per the 20-F.
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Below 5%, the 424B4 names entities affiliated with Silver Lake (17,023,932 ordinary shares pre-IPO), GIC (6,321,732), BlackRock (5,953,596), HMI Capital (5,565,120), and Mubadala (5,429,856). Smaller holders included Atomico, Ant Group, Institutional Venture Partners, Swedish insurer Skandia Liv, and H&M Fashion AB. Every one of these sold shares in the IPO, since the prospectus lists them as selling shareholders.
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Klarna uses a multi-class structure. Ordinary shares carry one vote and all the economic rights. Class B shares carry ten votes each but no dividends and no transferability, and they were issued only to shareholders who held stock before the IPO. That design keeps voting power concentrated with the pre-listing owners.
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The mechanics are laid out on the cover of the 424B4 prospectus. Just before listing, Klarna issued one Class B share as a bonus for each ordinary share held by existing shareholders. When a holder later sells or transfers ordinary shares, a matching number of that holder's Class B shares automatically convert into deferred shares, which have no votes. All Class B shares convert after 20 years from the IPO. In effect, the extra votes follow the original holder and disappear as that holder sells down.
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The result is heavy concentration. As of December 31, 2025, holders of Class B shares represented approximately 98.65% of the combined voting power of Klarna's ordinary and Class B shares, per the 20-F risk factors. Directors, executive officers, and 5% holders together held about 51.22% of combined voting power, the same filing says. Klarna also estimates that roughly 90.4% of the ordinary shares held by Class B holders would need to be sold before those holders collectively lost majority voting power.
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At year-end 2025 the company had 377,507,910 ordinary shares and 328,136,589 Class B shares outstanding, per the 20-F share capital table. Because Class B shares carry ten votes, the Class B count weighs roughly nine times as much as the ordinary share count in any shareholder vote.
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A third class exists on paper. Klarna may issue Class C shares, with ten votes and half the economic rights of an ordinary share, to Sebastian Siemiatkowski and his related parties. The 20-F caps them so their votes cannot exceed 15% of the voting rights attached to all shares outstanding immediately before the IPO. No Class C shares were outstanding at the end of 2025, per the same share capital table.
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The IPO lock-up on pre-listing shareholders ended on March 9, 2026, according to the 20-F. Klarna warned that sales after that date could redesignate a significant portion of Class B shares, which would raise the relative voting control of pre-IPO holders who keep their shares. Anyone tracking control after that date should check Klarna's Form 4 and 6-K filings on SEC EDGAR, since the 20-F table reflects a point in time.
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Klarna's IPO sold existing and new ordinary shares on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2025. Most of the shares came from existing investors rather than the company, so the offering mainly created liquidity for early backers while leaving the ownership order at the top unchanged.
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The 424B4 covered 34,311,274 ordinary shares at $40.00 each. Klarna itself offered 5,000,000 new shares, and selling shareholders offered the other 29,311,274, meaning the company received no proceeds from the majority of the deal. Before the offering, Klarna counted 264 US holders of record owning 38.92% of its ordinary shares, the prospectus notes. It also states that Klarna is not directly or indirectly owned or controlled by another corporation or any government.
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For context on how other large consumer fintechs split ownership after listing, see who owns PayPal, which has a widely held single class of stock, and who owns Chime, another consumer fintech with a public listing.
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Yes. Klarna's main operating subsidiary, Klarna Bank, holds a Swedish banking license and is supervised in Sweden. The license lets Klarna take consumer deposits and use them to fund lending, while the listed parent company is a UK public limited company. Ownership of the bank flows through the parent's shareholders.
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Klarna has operated as a licensed bank in the European Economic Area since 2017, when the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority approved its bank license, according to the 20-F. The same filing says deposits funded 95% of its lending activities in 2025. Klarna Bank has branches in France, Ireland, Italy, and Denmark and serves Switzerland cross-border. In the UK, its subsidiary operates as an electronic money institution supervised by the Financial Conduct Authority, and in the United States it relies on state money transmission and lending licenses, per the annual report.
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The banking status also constrains the corporate structure. The 20-F notes that these rules can limit the flexibility to restructure or dispose of regulated subsidiaries. Klarna's merchant payments ride on card networks and bank transfers; for the underlying mechanics, see payment rails explained.
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Klarna Group plc is incorporated in England and Wales, with its registered address in London, even though the business started in Sweden and runs its bank there. The UK holding company sits above the Swedish bank and is the entity whose shares trade in New York.
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The 424B4 cover identifies Klarna Group plc as incorporated in England and Wales, and the principal shareholders section lists 10 York Road, London as the address for its officers. As a foreign private issuer, Klarna files a 20-F each year and furnishes interim results on 6-K, per its annual report. Klarna also says it must keep either majority non-US voting ownership or meet management and asset tests to retain that status, which ties the share register directly to how it reports.
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This article relies only on Klarna's own regulatory filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for ownership data. Share counts and voting percentages are reproduced as filed, and economic stakes are simple ratios of those filed numbers. Secondary sources were used only for founding history, never for ownership figures.
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All ownership figures, share counts, and voting percentages come from two SEC filings retrieved from EDGAR: Klarna's Form 20-F for fiscal 2025, filed February 26, 2026, and its Form 424B4 IPO prospectus, filed September 10, 2025. Economic share percentages were computed by dividing each holder's ordinary shares by the 20-F's year-end ordinary share count. Holdings change as investors sell, so readers should confirm current positions against newer Form 4, 6-K, and 13G filings.
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