Spectacular Exit for Stocard founders! 3 Mannheim University Alumni sell their startup to fintec giant Klarna

Recently, the Swedish payment–provider Klarna bought the Mannheim based startup Stocard for an amount of 113 million Euros. According to the finance newspaper Finance Forward the price is paid in shares and cash. Stocard is the leading provider of mobile wallets and will serve as an amendment to Klarna’s shopping activities and app. Also interested in the acquisition of Stocard was the Chinese payment–provider Ant Financial owned by billionaire Jack Ma, reported the German daily Handelsblatt.

Stocard has been founded in 2011 by Florian Barth, Björn Goß and David Handlos following a trip to Australia where the original business idea was born. It was simple at the beginning: to store digitally all customer loyalty cards on the mobile phone. More recently, Stocard moved into the fintec space combining the shopping function with payment functionality. This made it apparently a highly attractive acquisition target.

All three founders are Alumni from University of Mannheim. David studied business administration, Björn and Florian studied business informatics/computer science. Over the years, the Stocard founders gave various presentations to Master and MBA students at Mannheim University and the Mannheim Business School. They have been also active at MCEI Founder Talks, and were key note speakers at several Mannheim entrepreneurship conferences such as the 1. Startup Homecoming Conference or the annual Qsummit conference. “I have been following Stocard and its founders closely over the years. They have shown a tremendous development”, says Prof. Woywode, who is holding the chair for entrepreneurship at Mannheim University. “Just a year ago I coauthored a startup case study on Stocard. The challenging question at that time was what should be Stocard’s next strategic moves. Now we know the answer. Although I would have hoped to see them grow independently. I congratulate the founders and the team to their huge success.”

Over the years Stocard has acquired around 26 million Euros of venture capital funding. Investors of the Mannheim-based company included Macquarie Capital, Carsten Maschmeyer with his fund Alstin or High-Tech Gründerfonds. Today there are around 60 million clients using the Stocard-app. Björn Goß and David Handlos will become managers at Klarna. The brand Stocard will remain.