The founders of Kazakh fintech platform Kaspi are new billionaires after a successful IPO on the London Stock Exchange -Forbes reports. According to Forbes, cofounder Vyacheslav Kim is worth just over $2.5 billion, while CEO and cofounder Mikhail Lomtadze owns a slice worth just over $2 billion.
Shares of the company started trading last Thursday at an initial price of $33.75 and closed Tuesday at $41.80. Kaspi claims to be Kazakhstan’s largest payments and fintech company, with over 7 million monthly users from a population of an estimated 18 million. Its catchall “Super App” for payments, loans and banking has, it claims, played an increasingly “integral part of people’s daily lives in Kazakhstan” as the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated “consumer adoption of cashless payments, e-Commerce and digital financial services,” according to a company statement before the IPO.
Kaspi earned $515 million in net income on $1.3 billion in revenue in 2019, according to its prospectus. And the company appears to have flourished during the pandemic, netting $286 million in profits on just over $740 million in revenue in the first half of 2020, per the prospectus. The IPO was “the largest London listing by a company from Kazakhstan since 2007 and is the largest international technology-focused IPO in London this year to date,” Forbes quotes Ayuna Nechaeva, head of Europe at the London Stock Exchange.
