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Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, speaking at a fintech event in London on Monday, April 4, 2022.

Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg via Getty Images

LONDON — After 20 years in the role as Klarna’s CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski is about to face his toughest test yet as the financial technology firm prepares for its blockbuster debut in New York.

Siemiatkowski, 43, co-founded Klarna in 2005 with fellow Swedish entrepreneurs Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson with the aim of taking on traditional banks and credit card firms with a more user-friendly online payments experience.

Today, Klarna is synonymous with “buy now, pay later” — a method of payment that allows people to buy things and either defer payment until the end of the month or pay off their purchases over a series of equal, interest-free monthly installments.

But while Siemiatkowski has grown Klarna into a fintech powerhouse, his entrepreneurial journey hasn’t been without its challenges — from facing rising competition from rivals such as PayPal, Affirm and Block‘s Afterpay, to an 85% valuation plunge.

Nevertheless, Siemiatkowski hasn’t taken those challenges lying down and the outspoken co-founder isn’t shy to challenge criticisms in the run up to an IPO that could value it at $15 billion.

‘Crazy enough’

In October 2024, CNBC met with Siamiatkowski during a visit the Swedish entrepreneur made to London. For a businessman who’s faced a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs over his two-year CEO tenure, Klarna’s chief has a calm air to him.

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“Independently of all the cycles and everything we’ve gone through with the company, at any point in time I ask myself, do I still think that Klarna can become the next Google in size, that we can become a hundreds of billions dollar market company, or a trillion dollars,” Siemiatkowski told CNBC. “I still am crazy enough to think that’s achievable.”

Once a pandemic-era darling valued at $46 billion in a SoftBank-led funding round, Klarna saw its valuation plummet 85% in 2022 to $6.7 billion as rising inflation and interest rates dented investor sentiment on high-growth technology firms.

But the firm has attempted to rebuild that eroded value in the years that have followed.

Klarna makes money predominantly from fees it charges merchants for providing its payment services, in addition to income from interest-bearing financing plans and advertising revenue.

Financials disclosed in its IPO filing show that Klarna reported revenue of $2.8 billion last year, up 24% year-over-year, and a net profit of $21 million — up from a net loss of $244 million in 2023.

Bullish on AI

After the launch of OpenAI’s generative AI ChatGPT in November 2022, Siemiatkowski quickly pivoted Klarna’s focus to embracing the technology, and especially in a way that could slash costs and enhance the firm’s profitability.

However, Siemiatkowski’s strategy and his comments on AI have also attracted controversy.

Klarna imposed a freeze on hiring in 2023 as it looked to tighten costs. The following year, the company said that its AI chatbot was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service jobs.

Klarna’s CEO then said in August that his company was able to reduce its overall workforce to 3,800 from 5,000 thanks in part to its application of AI in areas such as marketing and customer service.

“By simply not hiring … the company is kind of becoming smaller and smaller,” he told Reuters news agency, adding that jobs were disappearing due to attrition rather than layoffs.

Asked by CNBC about his views on AI and the upset they have caused, Siemiatkowski suggested he was “done apologizing,” echoing comments from Mark Zuckerberg about the Meta CEO’s “20-year mistake” of taking responsibility for issues for which he believed his company wasn’t to blame.

Doubling down, Siemiatkowski added that AI “already today can do a lot of the jobs that people do — but I don’t want to be one of the tech leaders that stands on a stage and says, ‘Don’t worry about it, there’s going to be new jobs,’ because I don’t know what those new jobs are.”

“I just want to be transparent and honest with what I think is happening, and I’d rather be open about that, because I know what these people, the tech leaders are saying when they’re not on public stages, and they’re not saying the exact same things,” he told CNBC in October.

An outspoken CEO

Siemiatkowski is no stranger to defending his company in response to criticisms, especially when challenged over Klarna’s business model of offering short-term financing for all kinds of things from clothing to online takeout.

Last week, Klarna announced a tie-up with DoorDash to offer its flexible payment options on the U.S. food delivery app. However, the move was met with backlash from internet users, who said it risks saddling struggling consumers with more debt.

One X user posted a meme showing personal finance pundit Dave Ramsey with the caption, “what do you mean you have $11k in ‘doordash debt’.”

Siemiatkowski took to X to defend the move, saying that Klarna “offers many payment methods” including the ability to pay in full instantly or defer payment until the end of the month in addition to monthly installments.

“DoorDash offers many products beyond food!” Klarna’s boss said on X in response to the criticisms. “I know we are most famous for pay in 4. But you can use a credit card at DoorDash as well.”

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In 2022, the outspoken entrepreneur stressed his company was “superior” to credit cards and “extremely recession-proof” after the firm laid off 10% of its workforce.

As Klarna approaches its stock market debut, investors will likely be scrutinizing his track record and whether he’s still the right person to lead the company longer term.

Lena Hackelöer, CEO of Stockholm-based fintech startup Brite Payments, is someone who’s worked under Siemiatkowski’s leadership, having worked for the company for seven years between 2010 and 2017 in various marketing functions.

She expressed admiration for the Klarna co-founder — and pushed back on suggestions that leadership mismanaged the business during the pandemic era.

“I never thought that they had mismanaged, which is somehow how it was reported,” Hackelöer told CNBC in a November interview. “I think that they were just very much focusing on growth — because that was the direction that investors were giving.”

Rollercoaster ride

Siemiatkowski admits the journey of building Klarna hasn’t always been rosy.

Asked about the biggest challenge he’s ever faced as CEO, Siemiatkowski said that, for him, laying off 10% of Klarna’s workforce in 2022 was the toughest thing he’s ever had to do.

“That was very difficult because I didn’t predict that investor sentiment would shift that fast and people would go from valuing companies like ours so high and then to something so low,” he said.

“That’s obviously very difficult because, then you realize like, ‘OK, s—, I’m going to have to make a change. It’s not going to be sustainable to continue, and I need to protect the consumers, who are stakeholders in the company, the employees, the investors — I need to [do] what’s right for all of my constituents,” Siemiatkowski continued.

Klarna is synonymous with the “buy now, pay later” trend of making a purchase and deferring payment until the end of the month or paying over interest-free monthly installments.

Nikolas Kokovlis | Nurphoto | Getty Images

I think anyone who is a little bit sane, that’s not something you take light hearted, right? It’s a tough decision. It makes you cry. I’ve cried.

Sebastian Siemiatkowski

CEO, Klarna

The company also onboarded hundreds of new employees to capitalize and expand on the opportunity it saw from government lockdowns’ impact on consumer behavior and the broader acceleration of e-commerce adoption at that time.

“I think anyone who is a little bit sane, that’s not something you take lighthearted, right?” Klarna’s CEO said, referring to the layoffs. “It’s a tough decision. It makes you cry. I’ve cried.”

However, Siemiatkowski stood by his decision to lay off workers: “I felt like I had an obligation to my constituents, everyone, all of these stakeholders, the company, and I think it was a necessary decision at that point in time.”

The road to IPO

Now, Klarna’s CEO faces his biggest test yet — taking the business he co-founded two decades ago public.

“IPOs are risky for companies as share prices can fluctuate quickly,” Nalin Patel, director of EMEA private capital research at PitchBook, told CNBC via email. “They can be costly and lengthy to arrange with investment banks too.”

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Klarna earlier this month filed its prospectus to list on the New York Stock Exchange. The company hasn’t yet set a date for when it will go public, nor has it priced shares.

If it succeeds, the outcome could catapult the net worth of Siemiatkowski and other shareholders including Sequoia Capital, Silver Lake, Mubadala Investment Company, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

Sequoia is Klarna’s single-largest shareholder with a 22% stake. Siemiatkowski is the second-largest, owning 7% of the business.

A positive IPO outcome would also lift the value of Klarna employees’ stakes, and potentially boost morale after a turbulent few years for the company.

“It’s a balance between finding a fair value for existing investors looking to cash out and new investors seeking a stake in Klarna at a fair price. Overvaluing the company could lead to its valuation falling in the future. While undervaluing it may mean money has been left on the table for those exiting,” Patel said.

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‘AI may eat software,’ but several tech names just wrapped a huge week

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'AI may eat software,' but several tech names just wrapped a huge week

A banner for Snowflake Inc. is displayed at the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate the company’s initial public offering on Sept. 16, 2020.

Brendan McDermid | Reuters

MongoDB’s stock just closed out its best week on record, leading a rally in enterprise technology companies that are seeing tailwinds from the artificial intelligence boom.

In addition to MongoDB’s 44% rally, Pure Storage soared 33%, its second-sharpest gain ever, while Snowflake jumped 21%. Autodesk rose 8.4%.

Since generative AI started taking off in late 2022 following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the big winners have been Nvidia, for its graphics processing units, as well as the cloud vendors like Microsoft, Google and Oracle, and companies packaging and selling GPUs, such as Dell and Super Micro Computer.

For many cloud software vendors and other enterprise tech companies, Wall Street has been waiting to see if AI will be a boon to their business, or if it might displace it.

Quarterly results this week and commentary from company executives may have eased some of those concerns, showing that the financial benefits of AI are making their way downstream.

MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday that enterprise rollouts of AI services are happening, but slowly.

“You start to see deployments of agents to automate back office, maybe automate sales and marketing, but it’s still not yet kind of full force in the enterprise,” Ittycheria said. “People want to see some wins before they deploy more investment.”

Revenue at MongoDB, which sells cloud database services, rose 24% from a year earlier to $591 million, sailing past the $556 million average analyst estimate, according to LSEG. Earnings also exceeded expectations, as did the company’s full-year forecast for profit and revenue.

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MongoDB said in its earnings report that it’s added more than 5,000 customers year-to-date, “the highest ever in the first half of the year.”

“We think that’s a good sign of future growth because a lot of these companies are AI native companies who are coming to MongoDB to run their business,” Ittycheria said.

Pure Storage enjoyed a record pop on Thursday, when the stock jumped 32% to an all-time high.

The data storage management vendor reported quarterly results that topped estimates and lifted its guidance for the year. But what’s exciting investors the most is early returns from Pure’s recent contract with Meta. Pure will help the social media company manage its massive storage needs efficiently with the demands of AI.

Pure said it started recognizing revenue from its Meta deployments in the second quarter, and finance chief Tarek Robbiati said on the earnings call that the company is seeing “increased interest from other hyperscalers” looking to replace their traditional storage with Pure’s technology.

‘Banger of a report’

Reports from MongoDB and Pure landed the same week that Nvidia announced quarterly earnings, and said revenue soared 56% from a year earlier, marking a ninth-straight quarter of growth in excess of 50%.

Nvidia has emerged as the world’s most-valuable company by selling advanced AI processors to all of the infrastructure providers and model developers.

While growth at Nvidia has slowed from its triple-digit rate in 2023 and 2024, it’s still expanding at a much faster pace than its megacap peers, indicating that there’s no end in sight when it comes to the expansive AI buildouts.

“It was a banger of a report,” said Brad Gerstner CEO of Altimeter Capital, in an interview with CNBC’s “Halftime Report” on Thursday. “This company is accelerating at scale.”

Read more CNBC tech news

Data analytics vendor Snowflake talked up its Snowflake AI data cloud in its quarterly earnings report on Wednesday.

Snowflake shares popped 20% following better-than-expected earnings and revenue. The company also boosted its guidance for the year for product revenue, and said it has more than 6,100 customers using Snowflake AI, up from 5,200 during the prior quarter.

“Our progress with AI has been remarkable,” Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said on the earnings call. “Today, AI is a core reason why customers are choosing Snowflake, influencing nearly 50% of new logos won in Q2.”

Autodesk, founded in 1982, has been around much longer than MongoDB, Pure Storage or Snowflake. The company is known for its AutoCAD software used in architecture and construction.

The company has underperformed the broader tech sector of late, and last year activist investor Starboard Value jumped into the stock to push for improvements in operations and financial performance, including cost cuts. In February, Autodesk slashed 9% of its workforce, and two months later the company settled with Starboard, adding two newcomers to its board.

The stock is still trailing the Nasdaq for the year, but climbed 9.1% on Friday after Autodesk reported results that exceeded Wall Street estimates and increased its full-year revenue guidance.

Last year, Autodesk introduced Project Bernini to develop new AI models and create what it calls “AI‑driven CAD engines.”

On Thursday’s earnings call, CEO Andrew Anagnost was asked what he’s most excited about across his company’s product portfolio when it comes to AI.

Anagnost touted the ability of Autodesk to help customers simplify workflow across products and promoted the Autodesk Assistant as a way to enhance productivity through simple prompts.

He also addressed the elephant in the room: The existential threat that AI presents.

“AI may eat software,” he said, “but it’s not gonna eat Autodesk.”

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Meta changes teen AI chatbot responses as Senate begins probe into ‘romantic’ conversations

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Meta changes teen AI chatbot responses as Senate begins probe into 'romantic' conversations

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg departs after attending a Federal Trade Commission trial that could force the company to unwind its acquisitions of messaging platform WhatsApp and image-sharing app Instagram, at U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 15, 2025.

Nathan Howard | Reuters

Meta on Friday said it is making temporary changes to its artificial intelligence chatbot policies related to teenagers as lawmakers voice concerns about safety and inappropriate conversations.

The social media giant is now training its AI chatbots so that they do not generate responses to teenagers about subjects like self-harm, suicide, disordered eating and avoid potentially inappropriate romantic conversations, a Meta spokesperson confirmed.

The company said AI chatbots will instead point teenagers to expert resources when appropriate.

“As our community grows and technology evolves, we’re continually learning about how young people may interact with these tools and strengthening our protections accordingly,” the company said in a statement.

Additionally, teenage users of Meta apps like Facebook and Instagram will only be able to access certain AI chatbots intended for educational and skill-development purposes.

The company said it’s unclear how long these temporary modifications will last, but they will begin rolling out over the next few weeks across the company’s apps in English-speaking countries. The “interim changes” are part of the company’s longer-term measures over teen safety.

TechCrunch was first to report the change.

Last week, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said that he was launching an investigation into Meta following a Reuters report about the company permitting its AI chatbots to engage in “romantic” and “sensual” conversations with teens and children.

Read more CNBC tech news

The Reuters report described an internal Meta document that detailed permissible AI chatbot behaviors that staff and contract workers should take into account when developing and training the software.  

In one example, the document cited by Reuters said that a chatbot would be allowed to have a romantic conversation with an eight-year-old and could tell the minor that “every inch of you is a masterpiece – a treasure I cherish deeply.”

A Meta spokesperson told Reuters at the time that “The examples and notes in question were and are erroneous and inconsistent with our policies, and have been removed.”

Most recently, the nonprofit advocacy group Common Sense Media released a risk assessment of Meta AI on Thursday and said that it should not be used by anyone under the age of 18, because the “system actively participates in planning dangerous activities, while dismissing legitimate requests for support,” the nonprofit said in a statement.

“This is not a system that needs improvement. It’s a system that needs to be completely rebuilt with safety as the number-one priority, not an afterthought,” said Common Sense Media CEO James Steyer in a statement. “No teen should use Meta AI until its fundamental safety failures are addressed.”

A separate Reuters report published on Friday found “dozens” of flirty AI chatbots based on celebrities like Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

The report said that when prompted, the AI chatbots would generate “photorealistic images of their namesakes posing in bathtubs or dressed in lingerie with their legs spread.”

A Meta spokesperson told CNBC in a statement that “the AI-generated imagery of public figures in compromising poses violates our rules.”

“Like others, we permit the generation of images containing public figures, but our policies are intended to prohibit nude, intimate or sexually suggestive imagery,” the Meta spokesperson said. “Meta’s AI Studio rules prohibit the direct impersonation of public figures.”

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Tesla asks for $243 million verdict to be tossed in fatal Autopilot crash suit

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Tesla asks for 3 million verdict to be tossed in fatal Autopilot crash suit

Dillon Angulo, 33, looks at a roadside memorial sign reading “Drive Safely In Memory Naibel Benavidez” next to the site of a car crash where a Tesla driver using Autopilot killed her, and left him catastrophically injured in 2019, on Aug. 12, 2025, in Key Largo, Florida.

Eva Marie Uzcategui | The Washington Post | Getty Images

Tesla has filed a motion to appeal the verdict in a product liability and wrongful death lawsuit that could cost the company $242.5 million if it is not reduced or overturned.

Elon Musk‘s automaker has asked for the verdict to be tossed or for a new trial in Florida’s Southern district court.

Gibson Dunn, which is representing Tesla in the appeal, argued that compensatory damages in the case should be steeply reduced from $129 million to $69 million at most. That would result in Tesla having to pay a $23 million award if the prior verdict holding the company partially liable for the crash stands up.

The firm also argued that punitive damages should be eliminated or reduced to, at most, three times compensatory damages due to a statutory cap in the state of Florida.

The suit focused on a fatal crash that occurred in 2019 in Key Largo, Florida, in which George McGee was driving his Tesla Model S sedan while using the company’s Enhanced Autopilot, a partially automated driving system.

While driving, McGee dropped his mobile phone and scrambled to pick it up. He said during the trial that he believed Enhanced Autopilot would brake if an obstacle was in the way.

Read more CNBC tech news

McGee’s Model S accelerated through an intersection at just over 60 miles per hour, hitting a nearby empty parked car and its owners, who were standing on the other side of their vehicle.

The collision killed 22-year-old Naibel Benavides and severely injured her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo.

A jury in a Miami federal court earlier this month said that Tesla should compensate the family of the deceased and the injured survivor, paying a $242.5 million portion of a total $329 million in damages that they decided were appropriate.

In their motion to appeal, Tesla’s lawyers argue that the Model S vehicle had no design defects, and that even alleged design defects could not be blamed for the crash, which they say was caused entirely by the driver.

“For as long as drivers remain at the wheel, any safety feature may embolden a few reckless drivers while enhancing safety for countless others,” the appeal states. “Holding Tesla liable for providing drivers with advanced safety features just because a reckless driver overrode them cannot be reconciled with Florida law.”

Tesla did not respond to a request for additional comment.

Brett Schreiber, lead trial counsel for the plaintiffs in this case, said in a statement that he believes the court will uphold the prior verdict, which should not be seen as “an indictment of the autonomous vehicle industry, but of Tesla’s reckless and unsafe development and deployment of its Autopilot system.”  

“The jury heard all the facts and came to the right conclusion that this was a case of shared responsibility but that does not discount the integral role Autopilot and the company’s misrepresentations of its capabilities played in the crash,” he said.

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