Fintech Highlights — September 2025

Klarna finally went public — and the market liked it. 

The Swedish buy-now-pay-later giant priced its IPO above range at $40/share, raising $1.37 billion at a ~$15.2 billion valuation, in what was the busiest week for U.S. IPOs since 2021.

It's a sharp recovery story: Klarna had been valued at over $46 billion by VCs in 2021 before dropping to $6.7 billion a year later. The company is positioning itself as more than a pure-play BNPL lender — it wants to be a full-service digital bank.

Coinbase made its "bank replacement" ambitions explicit. 

CEO Brian Armstrong told Fox Business he wants Coinbase to become customers' "primary financial services account," complete with cards and payments beyond crypto trading.

He also pushed back on bank lobbying efforts to block crypto exchanges from paying yield on stablecoin holdings — a fight playing out as the industry works through the stablecoin legislation passed in July.

Kraken is chasing a similar full-service vision with its new Krak app.

Google moved to let AI agents handle payments. 

The company launched its Agent Payment Protocol, an open-source standard built with Adyen, Mastercard, Amex, PayPal, and Coinbase, designed to let AI agents shop and transact on a user's behalf — with "mandates" serving as proof of authorization for each purchase.

Also this month: 

• Rain, a stablecoin-backed card issuer, raised $58M at nearly 6x its Series A valuation
• Cardless raised $60M for its branded-credit-card platform
• Samara, the Airbnb-spinout tiny-home manufacturer, raised $34M. And Tether reportedly explored investments in the gold mining supply chain — an odd-couple pairing of digital and physical stores of value