Klarna just Jordan-shrugged the entire IPO bear crowd…

Fresh off its debut on the NYSE, the buy-now-pay-later sorcerer has officially delivered its first earnings report as a public company, and let’s just say: the numbers came in hot, heavy, and slightly confused… kind of like my buddy who insists he’s “up big” on crypto but refuses to open the Coinbase app. 

Klarna beat revenue estimates, showed off monster U.S. growth, bragged about its AI supremacy, then… promptly posted a fat net loss and watched its stock drop 7%. Welcome to the public markets, sweetie.

Klarna rolled in with $903 million in revenue, topping the $882 million Wall Street was looking for, a clean beat powered by a 26% jump from last year. Gross merchandise volume hit $32.7 billion (up 23%) and active customers climbed to 114 million, a 32% jump that suggests people are still very into paying for socks in four installments. 

But for every good thing Klarna announced, they followed it with a “by the way…” because the company also reported a $95 million net loss for the quarter, a complete reversal from the $12 million profit it posted a year ago. Management blamed the loss on switching over to U.S. accounting rules after the NYSE listing… but clearly investors didn’t buy the excuse.

And if you thought Klarna was still a Swedish fintech that occasionally pops into the U.S. for brunch, please delete that thought. The U.S. is pretty much Klarna’s entire personality now. U.S. growth is doing all the heavy lifting here, with revenue up 51% and GMV up 43%. 

The Klarna Card, which launched in July, already has more than four million users and accounts for 15% of all transactions. And its “fair financing” product (longer installment plans for bigger purchases) has tripled GMV in the States. If Affirm is the nerdy kid in class raising its hand with the right answers, Klarna is the kid with a fake ID selling snacks out of his backpack. America loves this energy.

Then there’s CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, who I’m starting to wonder if he’s bipolar. On one side, he’s Klarna’s AI hype-man, bragging that the company used artificial intelligence to shrink its workforce by 40%, let an AI chatbot handle two-thirds of customer service, and cut issue-resolution times to under two minutes. He was one sentence away from saying they stuffed GPT into a Swedish guy and let it run the company.

But then you get the other Sebastian who told Financial Times that the tech industry’s trillion-dollar data-center binge might be “too much,” even hinting at hedging his own AI-infrastructure bets. This, by the way, is coming from a man invested in OpenAI, xAI, Cerebras, and Perplexity. Now he’s arguing that AI models are so efficient they won’t even need all the compute Big Tech is hoarding.

Meanwhile, Klarna’s stock has already shed more than a third of its value from its highs because investors are currently spooked about everything… AI bubbles, tariff threats, consumer spending fatigue, interest rates, GDP printouts, mercury retrograde, whatever. Klarna says it isn’t seeing any “material differences” in consumer behavior yet, but they’re monitoring things closely.

Still, Klarna expects revenue to top $1.07 billion this quarter, GMV to push toward $38.5 billion, and transaction margins to rocket from $281 million to nearly $400 million. The core business is humming… it’s everything happening around the business that looks like a bar fight.

But hey, first earnings report as a public company… let’s give them their flowers. The fundamentals say they’re built for the big leagues.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Bitcoin and Ethereum as mentioned in the article.