Bolt Raises $75M Series C1 To Advance One-Click Online Buying
Article originally published by Crunchbase News
San Francisco-based Bolt, founded in 2014, gives retailers and consumers more choice, control and flexibility over their transactions by managing the back-end of the checkout—presenting payment options, securely processing payments, and mitigating fraud—while providing a seamless front-end experience.
The latest funding is co-led by Westcap, which also led Bolt’s $50 million round in July, and General Atlantic. They were joined by existing investors Activant Capital and Tribe Capital, as well as a group of angel investors. To date, Bolt has raised a total of $215 million, according to Crunchbase data.
“We are investing a ton into the platform and in product engineering as we see so much reception of our product with enterprise clients,” Ryan Breslow, founder and CEO of Bolt said in an interview. “Our focus back in July was working in a transitional market, but now we are building enterprise retailers into our one-click network and expanding rapidly.”
In July, when the company raised the initial Series C, Bolt One Click was just getting off the ground, and now it is in full swing, Breslow said. Bolt processed more than $1 billion in retail transactions this year and saw a 10 times increase to its shopper network.
Last month, Bolt announced a strategic partnership with brand management company Authentic Brands Group to provide its checkout experience to its group of retailers, including Forever21, Lucky Brand and Brooks Brothers.
“This is what I have been dreaming about for the last five years of building the business,” Breslow added. “It is positioning us to do one-click in a way no one else is doing. This new partnership touches 50 million shoppers, a large percentage of whom will soon be on One Click.”
As shopping shifted to almost all online during the global pandemic, brands began to focus on the customer experience. Investors took notice, too, of startups developing the tools to do this. In addition to Bolt, companies such as Fast, which is also developing a one-click buying experience, raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Stripe in March. Meanwhile, investors sunk $3.3 billion of venture capital into e-commerce technology startups this year, according to Crunchbase data.
Anton Levy, co-president, managing director and global head of technology investing at General Atlantic, said Bolt is “creating a holistic checkout platform and bringing it to market.”
“We know that this is something that retailers need, and we see checkout as an increasingly critical category in commerce,” he said. “On top of this, Bolt’s one-click shopper network is growing significantly and shows real potential to level the playing field for independent brands. We’re thrilled to partner with Ryan and the Bolt team to prepare for rapid scale.”