Klarna's IPO Made Over 40 Employees Millionaires

Published October 26, 2026

Klarna priced its September 2025 New York IPO at $40 a share, raising $1.37 billion, and Sifted calculated that 39 current and former employees held shares worth at least $1 million at that price. Together with cofounders Sebastian Siemiatkowski (about $1 billion) and Victor Jacobsson (about $1.3 billion), that put the count of new Klarna millionaires above 40, though most shareholders faced a 180-day lock-in before they could sell.

In September 2025, after two decades as a private company, Swedish payments firm Klarna finally went public in New York, and the offering paperwork revealed a quiet redistribution of wealth. The buy-now, pay-later company priced its shares at $40, above its planned $35 to $37 range, raising $1.37 billion by selling 34.3 million shares, most of them from existing investors rather than the company itself. According to calculations by the European tech publication Sifted, 39 current and former employees held shares worth at least $1 million at that price, and together with the cofounders that put the count of new Klarna millionaires above 40.

Klarna had grown from a Stockholm startup founded in 2005 by Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Victor Jacobsson and Niklas Adalberth into a global payments brand built on a simple idea: let shoppers split a purchase into four payments over six weeks instead of putting it on a credit card. The product caught on worldwide, and by the time of the listing the company counted more than 100 million consumers. Sequoia Capital, which first invested in 2010, had become its largest shareholder, and the listing was one of the most watched European tech debuts of the year.

The biggest winners were, unsurprisingly, the people at the top. Chief executive Siemiatkowski owned 25.6 million shares worth about $1 billion and sold none of them in the offering, while Jacobsson, who had left the business years earlier, held 31.4 million shares worth about $1.3 billion and sold only a small slice. Sequoia's stake of almost 79 million shares was worth around $3.2 billion. Beneath them sat a layer of long-serving executives turned millionaires many times over: chief product officer David Fock, with the company for more than 15 years, held shares worth $24 million; chief operating officer Camilla Giesecke held $14.8 million; and former deputy chief executive Knut Frangsmyr, who left in 2023 after 11 years, held $14.8 million of his own.

What made the story unusual was how far down the ladder the wealth reached. Sifted counted 39 former or current employees beyond the founders and big investors with holdings above the million-dollar line, including staff who had joined in ordinary roles and stayed for years. For some early employees, investors said, the outcome of the listing would decide their financial lives outright. Set against that, the median Klarna shareholder at the end of 2024 held only about $130,000 of stock, a reminder that broad-based ownership still concentrates heavily at the top.

There was also a catch that the headline count did not capture. Most shareholders were locked in for 180 days after the listing, so the millionaire figures were paper values struck at the $40 IPO price, not cash in hand. Anyone counting on that wealth had to wait out the lock-in and hope the price held, which is a very different thing from banking a cheque on listing day. The distinction matters: an IPO can mint millionaires on paper long before it makes them rich in fact.

The lesson is about patience as much as about equity. Stock options and employee shares can turn years of unglamorous work into life-changing money, but only for people who stay long enough to vest, and only when the company actually reaches the public market. Klarna's listing rewarded endurance over brilliance: the people who became millionaires were mostly the ones who joined early, stayed for a decade or more, and waited for a payday that took twenty years to arrive.

The lesson: Equity rewards endurance over brilliance: the people who became millionaires were mostly the ones who joined early, stayed for years, and waited for a payday that took two decades to arrive.

Source: original reporting · How we source stories