Uber rival and eCommerce checkout platform Bolt raises $68 million in funding at over $1 billion valuation

Bolt, a tech startup that operates an eCommerce checkout platform in the cloud, has raised $68 million in Series B funding to scale its engineering team and invest in additional enterprise functionality for larger retailers. The latest funding now values the the San Francisco-based startup at over $1 billion. The round was led by Activant Capital and Tribe Capital Invest in Bolt, with support from retail executives at Allbirds, REVOLVE, Jet.com, and Bombas.

The startup will also use the new capital infusion to partner with best-in-breed ecommerce tools, shopping carts, and payments platforms and build advanced features, functionality, and optimizations around the shopping experience.

In a blog post, Ryan Breslow, Bolt CEO, said on the company’s website: “To help us accomplish our goal of perfecting the checkout experience, Bolt has raised an additional $68M in Series B funding in a round co-led by Activant Capital and Tribe Capital, bringing the total amount raised to $90M. Activant Capital is the leading investor in commerce technology. Tribe Capital is a venture capital firm created by three former partners at Social Capital, where they pioneered the use of data to recognize and amplify product/market fit.”

Bolt was founded in 2014 by Ryan Breslow and Eric Feldman. Bolt’s mission is to perfect the checkout experience for online retailers and make sure nothing gets in the way when shoppers decide to buy. We provide the industry’s fastest checkout that is optimized for any device and coupled with a unique approach to fraud detection that approves more good orders. By converting more shoppers into customers Bolt has become the proven choice of customer-obsessed retailers like Dita, HUF Worldwide, and Polywood.

Since its public launching in January 2018, Bolt has reached an annualized payment processing volume of more than $1 billion, conducted more than 1.5M transactions through the platform, and helped customers realize more than $25M in new revenue with our dynamically optimized checkout and conversion-focused fraud detection.

The Bolt team has also expanded from just ten people working out of a loft in San Francisco to over 125 employees across three offices, with top talent coming from companies like Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, and Braintree.

Commenting on the funding, Steven R. Sarracino, Founder & Partner, Activant Capital, said: “Bolt is the first company to give online retailers a single product for managing the most important part of their business: checkout. They’ve assembled the most elite product and engineering team I’ve ever seen to tackle some of the biggest problems in online retail, and have a breakthrough approach to fraud detection and checkout speed. The moment I was introduced to Bolt, I knew immediately that the company would be the missing piece of the e-commerce ecosystem that we’ve been waiting for.”