Stockholm-based fintech giant Klarna, a global retail bank, payments, and shopping service provider, announced that it has acquired PriceRunner, an impartial price comparison platform that aims to help users find the best deals.
The news comes after Klarna recently partnered up with San Francisco-based online payments processing giant, Stripe. The development meant that retailers using Stripe can now activate Klarna as the preferred payment method in their checkout.
“The best service for comparison shopping”
Founded in 1999 by Kristofer Arwin and Magnus Wiberg, PriceRunner is a comparison shopping service in the Nordic region. The company is independent of all manufacturers, brands, and retailers and aims to help consumers find the right products and the best deals.
PriceRunner, which is currently operational in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and the UK, compares 3.4 million products from 22,500 retailers in 25 countries. And during the 12-month period ending on Sep 30, 2021, the company has made revenues amounting to SEK 460M (approx €46.49M) and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 52 per cent.
Every month, PriceRunner is used by consumers to compare products, offers, attributes and to take part in professional product tests and user reviews of products and retailers.
Mikael Lindahl, PriceRunner’s CEO says, “We have spent the last five years rebuilding PriceRunner from scratch to create a best-in-class comparison shopping service while helping retail partners improve their business. We see Klarna as the ideal partner to accelerate growth and achieve our long-term vision to become the most loved comparison shopping service in the world.”
How will PriceRunner help Klarna?
With this acquisition, PriceRunner will offer new features such as product reviews, rich product discovery, and price comparisons to the Klarna app to better the shopping, payments, and banking experience for consumers globally.
Klarna will add PriceRunner’s functionality to its offering while Klarna’s retail partners will benefit from enhanced behavior insight, increased website traffic from high intent consumers, and optimised marketing opportunities to further drive their growth.
Speaking on the development, David Fock, Klarna’s Chief Product Officer says, “The acquisition will serve to strengthen our bank, card and payment services, and support a competitive global landscape. It also further cements that Klarna will not be a marketplace but a viable and competitive alternative for retail partners vs Amazon, Google, and Facebook.”
Everything about Klarna
Founded in 2005 by Niklas Adalberth, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, and Victor Jacobsson, Klarna is an e-commerce payment solutions platform for merchants and shoppers. The platform gives customers the freedom to choose how and when to pay.
The company has over 250,000 global retail partners, including H&M, Saks, Sephora, Macys, IKEA, Expedia Group, Samsung, ASOS, Peloton, Ralph Lauren, Abercrombie & Fitch, Nike, and Shein. It operates in 17 countries and has over 4,000 employees.
The company claims to be one of the highly valued private fintechs in the world with a valuation of $45.6B (approx €39.1B). To date, it has secured $3.7B (approx €3.1B) in funding. According to the company’s website, Klarna has a total of 90 million active consumers who transact around $2 million per day.
Last month, in October 2021, Klarna acquired Inspirock, an online trip planner platform that utilises local expertise and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The acquisition enables Klarna’s consumers to plan and shop for their trips before paying in installments through the Klarna app.
Prior to that, the company also acquired Stockholm-based SaaS startup APPRL and a social shopping platform HERO to tap into the growth potential of shopping across social media channels.
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