Klarna offloads London entrepreneur’s shopping tech after just three years

Fintech firm Klarna has sold assets in virtual shopping business Hero to Swedish video commerce platform Bambuser for around £1.1m just three years after buying the entire company for a reported £137m.

Klarna, the Swedish bank and UK’s largest buy-now pay-later provider, has offloaded a portion of the business to Bambuser, which will acquire a newly established UK company to hold the assets.

The maximum value of the deal is estimated to be roughly 15m Swedish Kroner (£1.1m), with the transaction expected to close in May.

Hero was founded by London-based entrepreneur Adam Levene in 2015. The brand aims to help retailers selling major brands compete with the likes of Amazon by connecting them with shoppers via text messages, videos and online chat rooms.

In July 2021, Klarna inked a deal reportedly worth $160m (£137m) to acquire Hero. It said it would introduce the solution to its 250,000 retail partners so their in-store and online sales teams could create digital marketing content and interact with shoppers online.

Three years later, a Klarna spokesperson said it had embedded Hero’s technology in “multiple parts” of its business and would retain more than 100 former Hero employees who joined Klarna following the initial acquisition.

”We have now made the decision to sell some of the underlying technology to Bambuser who will continue to offer this valuable tool to our merchant partners,” they added.

Maryam Ghahremani, chief executive of Bambuser, commented: “The acquisition of the Hero solution aligns perfectly with our vision to create the ultimate, high-converting shopping experience, combining the convenience of online shopping with the personal touch of in-store interactions.”

Klarna offers more than 150m active users the ability to delay or spread the cost of their purchases. The firm was once valued at $46bn (£37bn) in June 2021. However, higher interest rates later punished venture capital valuations, and its valuation fell to $6.7bn (£5.3bn) in July 2022.

The company is eying a return to regular profitability since it began aggressively expanding in 2018, as well as a much-anticipated stock market listing.