French startup Alma, which offers Klarna-like payment installment tools for retailers, raises €49M Series B
Context & Ripple Effects
Alma's €49M Series B lands it squarely in the buy now, pay later race that Klarna defined — the Swedish firm was raising around $250M at a $2.5B valuation back in 2017, and Alma is betting French and European retailers want a local installment provider rather than defaulting to the category leader.
The round also fits a broader French retail-fintech funding wave: Ankorstore, which builds wholesale infrastructure for the same independent shop owners Alma targets, went from a $29.9M seed-stage round to a €250M Series C within about a year. The bet paid off fast — barely a year later Alma raised a €115M Series C plus €95M in debt from Tencent, more than tripling its equity haul.
First-order effects
- Alma gets the capital to sign more merchants onto its installment checkout, giving independent European retailers a Klarna-style pay-later option without integrating a foreign incumbent.
- Klarna faces a localized challenger in France at exactly the moment its playbook — heavy funding, rapid merchant expansion — is being copied market by market.
Second-order effects
- Retail infrastructure players serving the same shops, like Ankorstore's wholesale marketplace, become natural bundling partners or acquisition targets as payments attach themselves to every layer of the independent-retail stack.
- Competing BNPL providers must respond with country-specific integrations and pricing, since Alma's pitch rests on local fit rather than product novelty.
Third-order effects
- If national champions keep raising at this cadence, European BNPL consolidates into a patchwork of regional leaders rather than one pan-European winner — with merchants eventually choosing between depth of local integration and scale of network.
- The pattern of payments startups riding retail-marketplace growth suggests installment credit becomes embedded infrastructure, priced and distributed through the platforms retailers already use.
The trend: Buy now, pay later is fragmenting along national lines in Europe, with locally rooted challengers like Alma raising successive rounds to unbundle Klarna's category lead market by market.