Bolt, the world’s first checkout experience platform, has raised a $50 million Series C round, 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.
“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, including:
- Category Creation: Bolt is the industry’s first checkout experience platform designed to standardize and simplify the checkout experience.
- Transaction Volume: The company has 3X’d transaction volume year over year, although this year’s transaction volume is already up 2.5X only six months in.
- Customer Success: Bolt has cut average checkout times of its customer’s sites nearly in half.
- Key Integrations: Bolt integrates with best-in-breed ecommerce tools, shopping carts, and payments processors including BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, PayPal, Apple Pay, AfterPay, Stripe, and Braintree with more coming this year.
- Noteworthy Customers: Growing and established companies have partnered with Bolt, including BadgleyMischka.com, Cariloha, Dita, Hyperice, PuppySpot and POLYWOOD, with more big-name customers to be announced in the coming months.
- New Product Offerings: Bolt has invested a lot in personalization to make its platform more flexible to supporting complex enterprise businesses, making it possible for merchants to stay with their current payment vendor, utilize alternative payment methods, and customize checkout to match the look and feel of a given brand.
“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.”
“The product experience is not only magical, but proven,” adds Allen Mask, Former Global Head of Product Marketing at Airbnb, current Head of Product at WestCap and Managing Partner of its affiliate, CōLab. “The dramatic uptick in conversion experienced by our customers speaks for itself. We’re excited to partner with the Bolt team to further revolutionize the checkout experience.”
Introducing Bolt’s Checkout Experience
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.
By combining all the services involved in checkout under one hood, Bolt enables a better buying experience for shoppers and maximizes conversion for retailers, helping them better compete with retail giants. In conjunction with shopping cart partners and hundreds of merchants, Bolt has strategically designed its platform to help retailers:
- Convert: Get shoppers to the finish line faster with fewer form fields and single-click checkout for returning customers. Increase lifetime value with frictionless account creation and integrated post-purchase experiences to convert one-time shoppers into repeat customers.
- Approve: Stay protected against fraud while approving more good orders. Bolt mitigates risk for retailers by using behavioral data collected throughout the checkout experience to inform fraud decisioning.
- Collect: Accept payments simply and securely through Bolt’s enterprise-grade payments processing solution, or keep your existing payment processor through a simple integration.
- Enhance: Customize the checkout experience by plugging into Bolt’s APIs and pre-built integrations, and continuously enhance checkout performance with Bolt’s reporting and analytics tools, actionable insights, and dedicated support.
“We needed an improved checkout and hassle free fraud protection, and with Bolt we got so much more,” says Katie Ouaknine, Owner of BadgleyMischka.com. “Our customers are loving the simplified checkout process and we are seeing far more orders passing through the system. It’s really turned our business around.”
Bolt will be using its new funding to expand the size of its engineering team and deepen its development of the four product areas above.
