Klarna, Gemini tee up initial public offerings

Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

Buy now, pay later financier Klarna is putting its highly anticipated initial public offering back in motion and cryptocurrency exchange Gemini also said it would go public in a sign of the IPO market's sustained momentum. 

Klarna expects to sell more than 34 million shares of its stock priced between $35 and $37 per share, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorganChase and Morgan Stanley serving as joint book-running managers. Gemini plans to sell more than 16 million shares between $17 and $19 per share. Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are serving as joint book-running managers of that deal.   

Klarna will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "KLAR." Gemini will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol "GEMI."

The two announcements come on the heels of recent listings from neobank Chime and stablecoin issuer Circle in June.

"The market is, indeed, hot," Lindsay Fitzgerald, general partner and co-founder of venture capital firm Vesey Ventures, told American Banker.  "After a few years of fintech winter, spring is here, and we expect 2025 will mark the beginning of a new cycle in fintech."

AI is enabling fintechs to solve new challenges, launch products faster and control their cash burn more efficiently along the way, attributes that are attractive to public and private investors, she said. 

"There was no summer slowdown in fintech private markets. 2025 was the most active summer in fintech venture I've seen in the 10 years we've been doing this, following a handful of successful fintech IPOs and M&A deals in the spring," Fitzgerald said. "Gemini and Klarna were first to the jump with announcements right after Labor Day, but we expect a number of companies to follow in their wake.."

The number of U.S.-based IPOs in the first half of this year have increased 35% to 109, compared with 81 deals in the same period in 2024, according to EY's Global IPO trends report. 

The BNPL industry has been firing on all cylinders. Klarna's main rival, Affirm, posted better-than-expected fiscal Q4 earnings on Thursday, with gross merchandise value of $1.2 billion, an increase of 132% year over year. Klarna too posted 37% year-over-year GMV growth in the second quarter. 

Klarna is looking to capitalize on that tailwind, said Greg Martin, managing director at Rainmaker Securities. 

"The BNPL tailwind is obviously good for Klarna," Martin told American Banker. "They see Affirm, they see how they're performing [and] how they're trading." 

It's not a bad time to be a crypto exchange entering the public market, either, said Kevin Lehtiniitty, CEO of Borderless.xyz, a global stablecoin and liquidity network. 

"We're seeing an explosion of local regulated liquidity providers getting VC funding around the world fueled in part by the path being blazed by Coinbase, Bullish, and Gemini quantifying the returns for investors and showing the viability of going public," Lehtiniitty told American Banker. "This liquidity forms the fundamental building blocks for payments and real world asset tokenization to scale around the world."

Klarna's announcement marks the BNPL fintech's second pass at an IPO. The fintech first filed a confidential IPO in November, but those plans were derailed by market volatility spurred by President Trump's on-again, off-again tariff policy. 

And while it still remains to be seen how tariffs impact inflation, volatility has largely subsided even if risks remain, Adam Hallquist, principal at FTV Capital, told American Banker. 

"The market is open between now and the end of the year for scaled, well-known, and venture-backed names to go public, particularly now that tariff volatility has stabilized, there are no major federal elections this fall, and there is more certainty on taxes in the near-term," Hallquist said. "However, there is still labor market risk and ongoing political headline risk around Trump vs. the Fed that could create downside between now and year-end."