Checkout Experience Platform Bolt Raises $50 Million

By Dan Anderson • Jul 20, 2020
  • Bolt announced that it has raised $50 million in Series C funding led by Laurence A. Tosi at WestCap. These are the details.

Bolt announced that it has raised $50 million in Series C funding led by Laurence A. Tosi at WestCap. Existing investors Activant Capital, Tribe Capital, Glynn Capital, and Human Capital joined the round along with new investments from a collection of current and former executives and board members from Magento, Venmo, PayPal, Lyft, Tommy Hilfiger, Tesla, and Lululemon.

Including this round of funding, the company has raised a total of around $140 million. And along with this news, the company announced that world’s first checkout experience platform to give retailers and consumers more choice, control, and flexibility over their transactions.

Bolt has been leveling the e-commerce 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. And the company has invested millions of dollars and years of experimentation into perfecting the checkout experience. This round of funding allows the company to continue building on its successes, including category creation, transaction volume, customer success, key integrations with tools like BigCommerce and Magento, noteworthy customers, and new product offerings.

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

The recent funding round of funding for the company included participation from Venmo’s former COO Michael Vaughn; Magento and PayPal’s former SVP of Strategy Mark Lenhard; Former President at Tesla, Former COO at Lyft, and current board member at Lululemon Jon McNeil; and Jonathan Weiner, Founder of Money2020 and Shoptalk.

With this round of funding, Bolt will be expanding the size of its engineering team and deepen its development of the four product areas above.

KEY QUOTES:

“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. 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.”

— Ryan Breslow, CEO and Co-founder of Bolt

“Retailers must provide their customers with a superior online shopping experience, especially in the current environment. Bolt’s market leading technology is democratizing ecommerce and empowering leading retail brands to compete in the digital world like never before.”

— Laurence Tosi, former CFO at Airbnb and Blackstone and Founder of WestCap

“The product experience is not only magical, but proven. 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.”

— Allen Mask, Former Global Head of Product Marketing at Airbnb, current Head of Product at WestCap and Managing Partner of its affiliate, CōLab

“We needed an improved checkout and hassle free fraud protection, and with Bolt we got so much more. 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.”

— Katie Ouaknine, Owner of BadgleyMischka.com