Leading IPO firms Davis Polk & Wardwell and Latham & Watkins have been called in for Klarna’s hotly-anticipated debut on the New York Stock Exchange.
Davis Polk advised Klarna on the IPO, which valued the Swedish fintech at just over $15bn, while Latham represented the underwriters in the offering.
Klarna and 300 of its investors, among them venture capital giant Sequoia Capital and Danish billionaire Anders Povlsen’s Heartland A/S, raised $1.37bn after selling 34.3 million shares at $40 each, above the marketed range of $35 and $37 and giving it a value of $15.1bn.
The Davis Polk team was led by capital markets trio Byron Rooney, Reuven Young and Daniel Gibbons. New York-based Rooney and Gibbons have previously advised on finance sector IPOs, including Robinhood’s and Brazil’s Nubank’s, while Young, who heads Davis Polk’s London capital markets team, led on Swedish investment firm EQT’s debut on Nasdaq Stockholm in 2019.
Meanwhile, the Latham team advising the underwriters was led by capital markets partners Marc Jaffe – managing partner of the firm’s New York office – alongside Alison Haggerty and Jenna Gascoyne.
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley acted as the lead underwriters on the matter, while BofA Securities, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank Securities, Societe Generale and UBS Investment Bank were involved as bookrunners and co-managers.
Klarna finished its first day of trading on Wednesday (10 September) at $46.40, giving it a market cap of around $17.5bn – well below the $45.6bn it was worth in 2021 at the height of the Covid-19 driven e-commerce boom, but still more than double the $6.7bn valuation it achieved after a private funding round in 2022 in a down period for payments firms.
The company was one of a number to postpone its IPO plans earlier this year after President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs rattled markets. Its listing – the largest for a Swedish firm in the US since Spotify’s in 2018 – signals renewed momentum for US IPOs, with a slate of seven firms, including crypto exchange Gemini set to go public in New York by the end of this week, according to Reuters.
The Davis Polk team guiding Klarna also included partners Adam Kaminsky (executive compensation); David Portilla (financial institutions); Pritesh Shah (intellectual property); Kara Mungovan (US tax); and Dominic Foulkes (UK tax).
Meanwhile at Latham advice was also provided on benefits matters by partner Jay Metz; on US data privacy and cybersecurity matters by partners Antony Kim and Clayton Northouse; on UK data privacy and cybersecurity matters by partner Fiona Maclean; on fintech and payment regulatory matters by partners Parag Patel and Gabriel Lakeman; on intellectual property matters by partners Anthony Klein and Pelin Serpin; on compliance matters by partner Kevin Chambers; and on tax matters by partners Rene de Vera, Aoife McCabe and Karl Mah.
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