Things have been happening lateley over at Stockholm-based safe payments provider Klarna. The company has just announced it raised €90 million from existing investors, including Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic, and Atomico in order to buy SOFORT, the direct banking company. Together, the two companies formed Klarna Group.
Klarna competes with online payment services like PayPal or Paymill. They’ve angeled themselves as the safe alternative to buying, allowing consumers to get the goods they’ve ordered online before they pay for it, allowing consumers to be sure they’re getting the product they’ve paid for.
The newly acquired company, SOFORT, is headquarted in Germany and allows customers to pay simply with their online banking details – a payment method that has some friction, but is widely adopted in Europe. SOFORT plugs into e-commerce shops and solutions for Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Poland, and the UK.
Lately Klarna has beed gigging deep into mobile, trying to become the frictionless platform for payments for ecommerce platforms. They cite that while 20% of all e-commerce traffic comes from mobile, mobile shoppers convert 60% less.
“This additional funding is a vote of confidence in Klarna’s long term vision to become the world’s favorite way to buy. Together with SOFORT we are the leading European alternative payment provider and we will now further accelerate our growth. We are very proud that our existing investors continue to support Klarna in this way”, said Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO and co-founder of Klarna in a statement.
Together the group has more than 1,000 companies and is active in 14 markets. In total they say they serve 25 million consumers with 45,000 merchants.
