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.
His 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 US AI companies. Flat Capital disclosed that it spent 34 million SEK on io, which converts to about $3.6 million.
Then came another surprising tweet from former Googler and designer Luke Wroblewski, who now works as a managing director at the secretive Silicon Valley VC powerhouse firm Sutter Hill Ventures.
In a since-deleted tweet and LinkedIn post, Wroblewski wrote, “congrats to io on the $6.5B acquisition by OpenAI today. happy to have been investors in this one.”
According to some who saw additional now-deleted tweets about Sutter’s investment, the firm may have been the second largest investor in io. TechCrunch couldn’t confirm that, though. Sutter didn’t respond to our request for comment, and Wroblewski deleted his posts after we reached out.
The biggest investor in io was OpenAI itself, with a 23% stake, sources told Bloomberg, adding that this stake was valued at around $1.5 billion. That means OpenAI paid about $5 billion in stock for the remaining shares. Other io backers, Bloomberg reported, included Laurene Powell Jobs’ firm Emerson Collective, Thrive Capital, Maverick Ventures, SV Angel and the OpenAI Fund. As we previously reported, that fund isn’t backed with the AI model maker’s money but by outside investors. Despite the deleted tweets, Bloomberg also confirmed Sutter Hill Ventures was an investor.