Bolt secures $50M Series C funding to bring smoother checkout experience platform for online retailers

The last time we wrote about Bolt was back in winter of 2019 after the unicorn startup and the world’s first checkout experience platform raised $68 million in funding to scale its engineering team and invest in additional enterprise functionality for larger retailer. A lot has changed since then and Bolt has experienced exponential growth.

Today, Bolt announced it has raised $50 million Series C round funding to expand the size of its engineering team and deepen its development of four product areas. The round was led by Laurence Tosi at WestCap, who notably scaled Airbnb’s payments platform to span 181 countries and served as CFO at Blackstone for seven years.

He joins existing investors Activant Capital; Tribe Capital; Glynn Capital; and Human Capital, alongside new investments from a collection of current and former executives and board members* from Magento, Venmo, PayPal, Lyft, Tommy Hilfiger, Tesla, and Lululemon. This new raise brings the company’s total funding to just shy of $140 million, and with it, Bolt unveils the world’s first checkout experience platform to give retailers and consumers more choice, control, and flexibility over their transactions.

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.

“We’re in the midst of an ecommerce revolution, which presents us with a now-or-never opportunity to redefine how people buy things online,” says Ryan Breslow, CEO and Co-founder of Bolt. “At Bolt, our mission is to democratize commerce by giving all businesses the tools they need to succeed, and checkout in particular is where retailers lose more customers than anywhere else in the ecommerce funnel. That’s why we’ve designed Bolt to handle all the components of checkout so that retailers can convert customers, grow their business, and be competitive against goliaths like Amazon.”

Bolt is leveling the ecommerce playfield with its one holistic product that offers a world-class checkout experience frontend, along with all the full stack of features and integrations that checkout touches. The company has invested millions of dollars and years of experimentation into perfecting the checkout experience, and this new round of funding allows the company to continue building on its successes.

“Retailers must provide their customers with a superior online shopping experience, especially in the current environment,” says Laurence Tosi, former CFO at Airbnb and Blackstone and Founder of WestCap. “Bolt’s market leading technology is democratizing ecommerce and empowering leading retail brands to compete in the digital world like never before.”

Bolt’s checkout experience platform gives online retailers one single product for managing the most important part of ecommerce: checkout. From presenting payment options, to securely processing payments, and mitigating fraud, Bolt handles everything on the backend that’s required to power a successful transaction while providing a frontend customer experience that feels like magic.