Kraken is owned by Payward, Inc., a privately held Delaware corporation co-founded in 2011 by Jesse Powell and Thanh Luu, according to Kraken's January 31, 2025 financial update. Its shareholders include the founders, employees and investors such as Jane Street, DRW Venture Capital and Citadel Securities, which were named in Kraken's November 18, 2025 funding announcement.
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No primary source publishes the size of any holder's stake. Payward confidentially submitted a draft IPO registration statement in November 2025, but a confidential draft is not public, and no public Payward S-1 appears on the Payward EDGAR record at the time of writing. Until one does, ownership percentages for Powell or anyone else are not on the record. Sibling pages cover who owns Coinbase and who owns Binance.
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Kraken's parent is Payward, Inc., a private company. Its owners are the people who started it, its employees and a set of investors named in company press releases. The biggest disclosed outside checks came in a two-tranche raise in late 2025. No holder's percentage stake has been published in any primary source.
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Payward's Form D filed August 4, 2026 lists the issuer as Payward, Inc., with Delaware as its jurisdiction of incorporation and a Cheyenne, Wyoming address for its related persons. Form D is a notice of an exempt securities offering. It names executives and directors but does not list shareholders or stake sizes.
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Jesse Powell co-founded Kraken and later moved from chief executive to chairman of the board under a leadership succession plan. He remains a named related person on Payward's recent securities filings. His ownership percentage has never been disclosed in a primary source.
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Kraken's September 21, 2022 press release said COO Dave Ripley would succeed co-founder and CEO Jesse Powell, who would become chairman. Powell's name appears first among related persons on the August 2026 Form D, alongside Thanh Luu, Arjun Sethi, Daniel Ciporin, Alison Davis, David Ripley, Robert Moore and Christopher Calicott.
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Being listed on a Form D shows a role as an officer, director or promoter, not a shareholding level. The filing's related persons section is useful for confirming who sits in leadership, but readers should not treat it as a cap table.
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Kraken's late 2025 round came in two tranches. Jane Street, DRW Venture Capital, HSG, Oppenheimer Alternative Investment Management, Tribe Capital and the family office of Kraken executive Arjun Sethi led the first tranche. Citadel Securities made a separate strategic investment in the second.
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Per the November 2025 announcement, the round totaled $800 million, including a $200 million strategic investment from Citadel Securities.
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The November 18, 2025 announcement says the Citadel Securities investment was executed at a $20 billion valuation. It also says Kraken had raised only $27 million in primary capital before that round. The earlier January 2025 update by Arjun Sethi made the same point, saying Kraken raised no more than $27 million in primary capital in its first 14 years.
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That history matters for ownership. A company that raised little outside capital for over a decade would, all else equal, leave more equity with founders and early employees. The company's own account stops short of quantifying that, so this page does too.
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Payward, Inc. is the legal name of the company that does business as Kraken. It is incorporated in Delaware, and its press releases are datelined Cheyenne, Wyoming. Payward is the entity that files SEC offering notices and that submitted the confidential IPO draft in November 2025, per sec.gov.
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The November 19, 2025 IPO release opens with "Payward, Inc. (dba 'Kraken')". EDGAR lists a series of Payward Form D notices, including one filed December 30, 2025 for an offering of up to $260,000,000, which describe private offerings but not the holders behind them.
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Payward's scale helps explain why ownership questions come up at all. In its first published financial highlights, Kraken reported 2024 adjusted revenue of $1.6 billion and $421 million in adjusted EBITDA, with 2.5 million funded accounts. The November 2025 release added that Kraken generated $1.5 billion in revenue in 2024 and passed that figure within the first three quarters of 2025. Those are company-reported, unaudited figures rather than SEC filings, and they describe the business, not the split of its equity.
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Kraken has taken the first formal step. Payward confidentially submitted a draft Form S-1 to the SEC in November 2025, with share count and price range not yet set. Kraken said the offering would follow SEC review, subject to market conditions. No public S-1 had been posted when this page was written.
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The Rule 135 announcement is the only public IPO document so far. When a public S-1 is filed, it will be required to include a principal stockholders table similar to the ones in the Coinbase and Circle proxies, and that table would be the first primary source to show Powell's and investors' stakes. The Payward EDGAR record is where it would appear.
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Three gaps limit what can be said about Kraken's owners. There is no public cap table, press releases name round leaders rather than every buyer, and the one published valuation is tied to a single tranche. Until a public S-1 appears, those limits stay in place.
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First, no cap table is public, so this page names investors without ranking them by size. Second, press releases name round leaders, not every participant, per the November 2025 announcement. Third, the $20 billion valuation applies to the Citadel Securities tranche as stated, and this page does not extend it to other transactions or later dates.
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No. Payward is private and had only confidentially submitted a draft S-1 as of its November 19, 2025 release.
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Jesse Powell and Thanh Luu, in 2011, per Kraken's 2024 financial highlights post.
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Citadel Securities' $200 million investment was executed at a $20 billion valuation, per the November 18, 2025 announcement.
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Citadel Securities agreed to a $200 million strategic investment, per Kraken. Its percentage was not disclosed.
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Arjun Sethi is identified as Co-CEO in the November 2025 funding release.
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All claims come from Kraken's own press releases and Payward's SEC filings, viewed directly at the source. No stake percentages were taken from news coverage, secondary market data or search summaries. Where a primary source is silent, including on Jesse Powell's stake, this page states the gap rather than estimating it.