AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Zoom
Klarna
BUSINESS MODEL
Zoom
Zoom uses a freemium model. Free accounts get unlimited one-on-one meetings and 40-minute group meetings.
Paid plans start at $13.33/month per user for Pro (meetings up to 30 hours), $18.33/month for Business, and custom pricing for Enterprise. Zoom also charges for add-ons — Zoom Phone (cloud phone system), Zoom Rooms (conference room hardware), and Zoom Contact Center.
The free tier is the hook. The 40-minute limit on group calls creates just enough friction to push power users to pay.
And once one person in a company pays, the whole team follows because nobody wants to be the one whose meetings keep getting cut off.
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.
HOW THEY STARTED
Zoom
Eric Yuan grew up in Tai'an, a mining city in Shandong province, China. In 1997, he was 27 and inspired by the internet boom happening in America.
He applied for a US visa. He was rejected.
He applied again. Rejected again.
Eight times total over two years before he finally got approved in 1997. He moved to Silicon Valley with barely any English and joined WebEx as one of its first engineers.
Yuan spent 14 years at WebEx, eventually becoming VP of Engineering. Cisco acquired WebEx in 2007 for $3.2 billion.
Yuan watched Cisco slowly bloat the product with enterprise features while the core video quality deteriorated. He kept telling Cisco leadership they needed to rebuild the product from scratch.
They kept saying no.
In 2011, Yuan quit and took 40 WebEx engineers with him. He founded Zoom Video Communications with a simple thesis: video meetings should just work.
No downloads. No lag.
No "can you hear me?" No IT department required. He built the product that Cisco refused to build.
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.
HOW THEY GREW
Zoom
Zoom grew on one thing: it worked. In a world where every video call started with five minutes of technical issues, Zoom calls just connected.
That reliability was the entire marketing strategy for the first five years.
The freemium model did the rest. Teachers, coaches, therapists, book clubs, and small teams all started on the free tier.
When they hit the 40-minute limit, enough of them converted to paid. And every free meeting was essentially a demo — everyone in the meeting saw how good Zoom was.
Yuan obsessed over simplicity. While competitors like WebEx and GoToMeeting required downloads, plugins, and IT involvement, Zoom worked in the browser with one click.
The learning curve was essentially zero. Your grandmother could figure it out.
That turned out to be extremely important when a pandemic suddenly required your grandmother to figure it out.
Then COVID happened. In March 2020, the world shut down.
Every meeting — work, school, family, doctor, church, happy hour — moved to video. Zoom was already the easiest option.
Daily participants exploded from 10 million to 300 million in four months. The stock went from $70 to $588.
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.
THE HARD PART
Zoom
The post-pandemic hangover has been severe. Zoom's stock peaked at $588 in October 2020 and crashed to under $70 by 2022 — an 88% drop.
The company went from the most exciting tech stock on the planet to a cautionary tale about pandemic valuations. Revenue growth slowed from 300%+ to single digits as people returned to offices and competitors caught up.
Security and "Zoombombing" were early crises. In early 2020, as millions of new users flooded in, trolls discovered they could join open Zoom meetings and share offensive content.
Schools, churches, and AA meetings were disrupted. It turned out Zoom's encryption wasn't truly end-to-end as advertised.
Yuan had to halt all feature development for 90 days and focus exclusively on security fixes. It was a near-death reputational crisis.
Competition from Microsoft Teams and Google Meet intensified. Both companies bundled video calling for free into products that hundreds of millions of people already used.
Microsoft Teams integrated directly into Office 365. Google Meet was built into Gmail.
Zoom had to compete against free products from two of the richest companies on Earth.
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.
THE PRODUCTS
Zoom
Zoom Meetings is the core — video calls that actually work. Zoom Webinars handles large-scale events with up to 50,000 attendees.
Zoom Phone is a full cloud-based phone system replacing traditional office phones. Zoom Rooms turns physical conference rooms into one-click video meeting spaces.
Zoom Contact Center competes with established call center software. Zoom Team Chat is their Slack/Teams competitor.
Zoom Whiteboard is a collaborative digital canvas. Zoom Revenue Accelerator uses AI to analyze sales calls.
And Zoom AI Companion summarizes meetings and drafts messages.
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.
WHO BACKED THEM
Zoom
Sequoia Capital, Emergence Capital, Horizons Ventures (Li Ka-shing), Qualcomm Ventures
Klarna
Sequoia Capital, SoftBank, Silver Lake, GIC, Atomico, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Heartland