Klarna CEO and Sutter Hill take victory lap after Jony Ive’s OpenAI deal

Hours after Sam Altman and Jony Ive announced on Wednesday that OpenAI was buying Ive’s company, io, in an all-stock transaction valued at $6.5 billion, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski posted a surprising message on X. Siemiatkowski’s family investment office, Flat Capital, had bought shares in io six months earlier, he said. Since this is an all-stock deal, those io shares will be converted into shares in the for-profit arm of OpenAI. “Excited that @FlatCapital was an investor in io and that we will now receive even more shares in OpenAI at a hefty return for an investment we did some 6 months ago,” Siemiatkowski tweeted. The post generated so much interest that his investment firm issued a public statement confirming that io was the mystery, unnamed company it backed when it announced its four investments in a “mini-portfolio” of U.S. AI companies. Flat Capital disclosed that it spent 34 million SEK on io, which converts to about $3.6 million. Then came another surprising twee ... Read full article.