This week, the CEO of popular buy now, pay later app Klarna, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, made headlines when he teased that a public listing in the US could be forthcoming.
The company has followed a path that in some ways exemplifies the boom and bust that fintech startups endured in the last cycle. After raising a blockbuster $639 million round in 2021 at a $45.6 billion valuation led by SoftBank, Klarna took a down round at an 85% valuation discount in 2022. But in November, the company announced it had turned its first quarterly profit, positioning itself for an IPO.
Proving profitability will be more critical than ever for companies readying themselves for a public listing. “This past year, the market has rewarded public companies which have done so, such as Nubank and Wise,” PitchBook senior fintech analyst Rudy Yang said.
Here are 10 US venture-backed enterprise fintech unicorns with a high likelihood of going public. The list was created using PitchBook’s VC Exit Predictor, which calculates exit probability using a machine learning model that is fed historic and real-time data on private company exits. The predictor draws from 34 inputs related to company characteristics, financing and investors.
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