Nuro

Klarna

Nuro

Nuro's business model is delivery-as-a-service. They partner with retailers, restaurants, and grocery chains who pay Nuro to handle last-mile delivery using autonomous vehicles.

Instead of employing human drivers, partners use Nuro's robot fleet.

The economics are compelling on paper. A human delivery driver costs $15-25 per hour including wages, insurance, and vehicle costs.

A Nuro vehicle costs money to build and maintain, but once deployed, it operates nearly 24/7 with no driver wages, no tips, and no breaks. The breakeven point comes when the fleet reaches sufficient utilization in a market.

Revenue also comes from technology licensing. Nuro has partnerships where their autonomy stack could be integrated into other vehicles or platforms.

FedEx, Domino's, Kroger, Walmart, and 7-Eleven have all tested or deployed Nuro vehicles for delivery.

Klarna

Klarna makes money from merchant fees and consumer interest. Merchants pay Klarna 3-6% of each transaction — they're willing to pay because Klarna increases conversion rates by 30%+ and average order values by 45%.

On "Pay in 4" (interest-free installments), Klarna makes money purely from merchant fees. On longer financing (6-36 months), Klarna charges consumers interest up to 25% APR.

Klarna also earns revenue from its shopping app (affiliate commissions when users discover and buy from merchants), and from its Klarna Card.

Nuro

Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu were both principal engineers at Google's self-driving car project (later Waymo). Ferguson led the machine learning and motion planning teams.

Zhu worked on perception — teaching cars to see and understand the world. They were two of the most senior engineers in autonomous driving.

In 2016, they left Google with a contrarian insight: the hardest part of self-driving cars wasn't the technology. It was the stakes.

A robo-taxi carrying passengers needs to be essentially perfect — any accident could injure or kill someone inside and destroy public trust. But a delivery vehicle carrying groceries?

If it gets in a fender bender, the worst case is squished bananas.

By removing the human from the vehicle, Nuro eliminated the most complex variable in autonomous driving safety. Their vehicles are small, light (under 1,200 pounds), and slow (max 25 mph on surface streets).

If one hits a pedestrian, the impact energy is dramatically lower than a 4,000-pound car going 40 mph. This let them get regulatory approval years before full-size robo-taxis.

The first prototype, R1, looked like a cartoon car — about half the width of a normal vehicle, with no windows, no mirrors, and no driver's seat. Just cargo space and sensors.

They revealed it in 2018 and began testing in Scottsdale, Arizona with Kroger for grocery deliveries.

Klarna

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth, and Victor Jacobsson were students at the Stockholm School of Economics. In 2005, they entered a startup competition with an idea: let people buy things online and pay later.

At the time, online shopping was still new and most people were terrified of entering their credit card details on the internet. The idea was simple — Klarna would pay the merchant immediately, and the customer would get an invoice with 14-30 days to pay.

The competition judges hated it. The idea was dismissed as financially irresponsible and the team didn't win.

But Siemiatkowski pressed on. Swedish e-commerce was growing fast and merchants were desperate for any way to reduce cart abandonment.

Klarna's "pay after delivery" model was a hit because it shifted the risk — customers could receive the product, try it on, and only pay for what they kept.

The first customers were Swedish e-commerce merchants selling fashion and home goods. Klarna handled the invoicing, fraud detection, and collections.

Merchants saw conversion rates jump because customers were more willing to buy when they didn't have to pay immediately.

Nuro

Nuro's strategy is to become the default autonomous delivery infrastructure for major retailers. Rather than build a consumer-facing delivery app (competing with DoorDash and Instacart), Nuro provides the robotic fleet that powers deliveries for existing brands.

The partnership-first approach reduces go-to-market friction. Kroger, Walmart, and FedEx already have massive customer bases and order volumes.

Nuro provides the autonomous last-mile delivery layer. The retailer gets lower delivery costs.

Nuro gets guaranteed demand.

Geographic expansion follows a city-by-city playbook. Nuro maps a market, gets regulatory approval, deploys a small fleet, proves reliability, then scales up.

Houston and Mountain View were early markets. The goal is to have fleets operating in major metros across the US.

Klarna

Klarna grew by being embedded at checkout. The strategy was to sign up the biggest online retailers and become a payment option alongside Visa and PayPal.

Once Klarna was at checkout, consumers discovered it organically. The "Pay in 4" button became ubiquitous across fashion, electronics, and home goods retailers.

The Klarna app became a growth engine beyond checkout. By building a shopping app where users could browse products, discover deals, and track deliveries, Klarna turned from a payment method into a shopping destination.

The app has 35+ million monthly active users who start their shopping journey inside Klarna before even visiting a retailer.

International expansion was aggressive. Starting in Sweden, Klarna rolled out across Europe, then into the US, UK, and Australia.

The US became the biggest growth market — American consumers were especially receptive to Pay in 4 as an alternative to credit cards. By 2023, Klarna had 34 million US users.

Nuro

The technology still has limitations in complex scenarios. Nuro vehicles operate on surface streets at low speeds — they can't handle highways, heavy snow, or extremely dense urban environments like Manhattan.

This limits the addressable market to suburban deliveries in good weather, which is a large market but not the whole market.

The path to profitability is long. Building custom autonomous vehicles is extraordinarily capital-intensive.

Each generation of vehicle requires hundreds of millions in design, engineering, testing, and manufacturing. Nuro has burned through most of its $2.1 billion in funding and laid off 30% of staff in 2023, signaling the cash crunch is real.

Competition comes from multiple directions. Amazon is developing its own delivery robots (Scout, though paused).

Waymo and Cruise could pivot to autonomous delivery. Established delivery companies could partner with other autonomy providers.

And human drivers remain cheaper than robots at current scale — the economics only flip once Nuro has hundreds or thousands of vehicles per market.

Klarna

The valuation collapse was humiliating. Klarna raised at a $46 billion valuation from SoftBank in 2021.

One year later, they raised a down round at $6.7 billion — an 85% haircut. It was the most dramatic valuation drop in fintech history.

Employee stock options were underwater. Siemiatkowski had to lay off 10% of the workforce.

The entire BNPL category went from hot to radioactive in months.

Credit losses are the existential risk. Klarna is lending money to consumers who want to buy things they can't afford to pay for right now.

When the economy slows, defaults rise. Klarna's credit losses hit $1 billion in 2022.

The company had to tighten underwriting significantly and pull back from riskier markets. The tension between growth (approve more loans) and profitability (reject risky borrowers) defines every quarter.

The IPO in 2025 was a comeback story but with caveats. Klarna went public at $15 billion — a major recovery from the $6.7 billion trough but still less than a third of its 2021 peak.

The company finally turned profitable by slashing costs with AI (replacing hundreds of customer service agents with AI chatbots) and tightening credit standards. But investors remain cautious about the BNPL model's long-term sustainability.

Nuro

Nuro R3 — the third-generation autonomous delivery vehicle, purpose-built with no passenger compartment. Larger cargo capacity than R2, improved sensor suite, and designed for commercial-scale manufacturing.

Nuro Autonomy Platform — the self-driving software stack including perception, prediction, planning, and control that runs Nuro's vehicles. Nuro Driver — the AI system that handles all driving decisions in real-time, combining lidar, cameras, radar, and thermal sensors.

Nuro Fleet Management — cloud-based tools for partners to monitor, dispatch, and manage Nuro vehicles across delivery zones.

Klarna

Pay in 4 is the signature product — split any purchase into four interest-free payments over six weeks. Pay in 30 lets customers receive the product first and pay within 30 days.

Financing offers longer-term payment plans with interest for larger purchases. The Klarna App is a shopping destination — browse deals, track orders, manage payments, and earn cashback.

The Klarna Card is a physical Visa card that lets users Pay in 4 anywhere. Klarna Creator is a platform for influencers to earn commissions sharing products.

Klarna AI is their customer service chatbot that handles two-thirds of support queries.

Nuro

SoftBank Vision Fund led the massive $940 million Series B in 2019. Tiger Global led the Series C at an $8.6 billion valuation.

Greylock Partners and Gaorong Capital were early investors. Alphabet (Google's parent) invested through its venture arm.

Woven Capital (Toyota's investment fund) participated, reflecting automotive industry interest. The company has raised approximately $2.1 billion total.

Klarna

Sequoia Capital, SoftBank, Silver Lake, GIC, Atomico, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Heartland