The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.
1994
🌱
1994
Founded in Sweden
Brothers Rickard and Björn Öste turn Lund University oat research into a dairy alternative.
Wikipedia
2020
🦄
2020
Blackstone round makes it a unicorn
A $200M round with celebrity co-investors values the oat-milk maker in the billions; hip branding does the rest.
Reuters
May 2021
📈
May 2021
The peak: the $10B oat-milk IPO$10B
Lists on Nasdaq at about $10B and briefly trades above $15B.
CNBC
2021–23
2021–23
Factories miss, shelves go bare
Botched production build-outs leave Oatly short on supply while Planet Oat and Danone's Silk seize the shelf space.
CNBC
2022
💔
2022
Slips out of the club
The stock's ~97% slide takes the market cap down toward a few hundred million.
stockanalysis.com
2022–24
💬
From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2022–24
Glassdoor reviewers stayed split through the slide: many prized the mission and culture, but they consistently described a company that never outgrew its startup disorganization — unscalable processes, repeated cost-cutting layoffs in pursuit of profitability, and a Swedish-HQ-versus-regional divide that left strategy muddled.
Today
Today
Still in the club — and still trading
Live · OTLY · NasdaqGSas of 2026-09-17
$12.42▼ 0.88% today≈ $396M cap · −96.0% from peak
💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.
How it happened
Oatly, the Swedish maker of oat-based milk and dairy alternatives, became a sensation with hip branding and Blackstone-backed funding before its May 2021 Nasdaq IPO at about $10B — and briefly traded above $15B.
Botched factory build-outs left it missing production targets and short on supply, letting rivals like Planet Oat and Danone's Silk seize shelf space; the stock fell roughly 97%, leaving Oatly worth a few hundred million by the mid-2020s.
Source: CNBC / stockanalysis / Food Institute (~$10B IPO valuation May 2021, traded above $15B; ~$0.3B market cap by 2025; execution and production-buildout failures)
Founders & leadership
TP
Toni Petersson
CEO (2012-2022)
Now Co-Founder and Partner at Tadaima Ventures · LinkedIn ↗
RÖ
Rickard Öste
co-founder (Lund University food scientist; invented oat milk)
No public profile matched
BÖ
Björn Öste
co-founder
Now Co-Founder, CEO at Good Idea Drinks · LinkedIn ↗
Current roles as self-reported on LinkedIn, retrieved 2026-08-21. See our methodology.
