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San Francisco-based Bolt, founded in 2014, manages the back-end of digital checkouts to gives retailers and consumers more choice, control and flexibility over their transactions.

The platform combines lightning-fast checkout, payment processing and fraud protection with full chargeback coverage.

Levelling the e-commerce playing field, Bolt offers merchants a simple but powerful checkout solution that increases conversion rates while eliminating fraud.

Bolt has been defining checkout long before anyone saw it as a category. We have been proud to back the company across every round since the Series A in 2018.

Bolt had a very strong technical solution but future growth depended on developing the commercial skills required to win with enterprise and SMB customers alike. Activant was well positioned to help drive growth to the next level.

Activant

Tribe Capital

 Streamlined Ventures

 RiverPark Ventures

General Atlantic

Westcap

 Tribe Capital

 H14

Soma Capital

BlackRock

H.I.G. Growth Partners

Moore Strategic Ventures

Digital Horizon

Building a shopping community by solving the biggest pain point in e-commerce.

Bolt expands its one-click checkout to Europe

Fintech Startup Bolt Sees Valuation Surge to $6 Billion

Checkout startup Bolt hires former Amazon exec as CTO.

Can Bolt’s “culture playbook” become the 2021 equivalent of Netflix’s famous “no vacation policy” PowerPoint deck?

Solving the biggest pain point in ecommerce


As eCommerce picked up steam in the early 2010s, Amazon quickly became the defining force. Amazon won consumers with convenience: fast delivery, and even faster checkout.

Identifying the trend of commodification and the inevitable need for merchants to break free of Amazon's ecosystem, Ryan dropped out of Stanford in 2014 to found Bolt.

Checkout was the focal point of all commerce, and where potential customers always dropped off due to convoluted form-filling. Every merchant needs one-click checkout.

Bringing the Fight to Amazon

Consumers were getting used to paying online and Stripe was making it easy for developers to embed a payment gateway. An increase in card-not-present transactions was driving adoption of fraud tools. 

And from shopping cards, subscription tools, loyalty & reward trackers and more, the market was swimming with point solutions.

But was clear was conversion. Merchants were losing customers at the final step—the checkout button. So Ryan and his team set out to create Checkout category, back when few understood the vision.

With a ruthless focus on efficiency, the team at Bolt built a world-class checkout experience, marrying lightning-fast clickthrough with best-in-class fraud protection. 

The result was a 15%+ increase in conversion for merchants.

Bolt was so confident in their fraud engine that they offered 100% chargeback for merchants; Bolt increased sales and reducing cost simultaneously.

Technology

“By bringing together an expert team from companies like Braintree, Stripe, Square, and Uber, we've solved some of the toughest and most intricate challenges associated with checkout, any brand can trust us with what we consider to be the most crucial part of the shopper experience.”

Activant had spent years investing in commerce infrastructure platforms like 

. After talking to dozens of executives at major brands—namely Chief Digital Officers and Chief Experience Officers, it became clear to us that there was a need for a modern platform to handle checkout.

Activant's ecosystem to an introduction to Ryan during Bolt's Series A in the summer of 2018. The Company was too early for a growth investment from Activant, but our thesis aligned with Ryan's vision. After our retailer contacts validated the quality of Bolt's product, we invested a small follow-on check to establish a partnership.

We made several key introductions to brand partners while getting to know Ryan and his team in San Francisco as they mapped out their vision for one-click everywhere.

Bolt continued to accelerate and showed no signs of slowing.

Signing brand after brand, they were creating the Checkout category in front of our eyes. As customers grew, so did their need for engineering and go-to-market resources.

A year after the Series A, Activant stepped up to lead Bolt's $68 MM Series B round, joining the Board of Directors.

Series B: Defining the Checkout Category

As the Bolt moved to larger and larger merchants and built out their platform, enterprise retailers began to take note.

Bolt's ability to centralize fast checkout, payments, and fraud in a single place, operate across brands, and embed anywhere a customer interacts with a merchant made for a powerful enterprise offering.

In 2020, the Company secured a landmark partnership with Authentic Brands Group (ABG) to bring Bolt's checkout experience to ABG's portfolio of iconic brands. 

Bolt is live today with Forever 21 and is expanding across Brooks Brothers, Aéropostale, Nautica, and more.

Unlocking Enterprise

Hot off the heels of the ABG contract, Bolt closed their Series C round led by General Atlantic and WestCap in December 2020.

Activant was proud to continue to support Ryan and his team.

With $125 MM in fresh growth capital, the Bolt team set out to continue to execute their vision.

Series C

Bolt then shipped another piece of their vision: 

 Once a customer uses Bolt checkout once and creates a Bolt account, they unlock one-click checkout with that merchant 

After launching at the end of 2020, the Company already has over 7 million Bolt accounts. The ABG partnership will provide access to 50 million more.

Ultimately, this creates a better shopping experience for consumers and drives a powerful network effect for merchants, who see huge uplift in conversion and sales with Bolt.

The One-Click Network Effect

As the Bolt platform builds—and with it the opportunity set—Ryan has continued to lead Bolt's relentless focus on hiring the best.

Amazon veteran and VP Maju Kuruvilla joined the Bolt team in January 2020 as Bolt's first Chief Technology and Product officer to lead the product and engineering teams.

Hiring the Best

“I’ve always been attracted to complex problems and how to use technology to simplify and improve the world around me. When Ryan first shared with me his vision for democratizing commerce by leveling the playing field for merchants, it got me thinking...”

Maju Kuruvilla
Chief Product & Technology Officer, Bolt

In the 6 years since their founding, Ryan and the Bolt team were always deliberate in how they built and maintained their culture: prioritizing writing over talking, frequent and thorough feedback, and risk taking without judgement.

In 2021, they open-sourced their culture handbook, “

,” so other leaders across all industries could adopt their principles.

https://conscious.org/

Setting the Culture Bar

We've been proud to support Ryan and the Bolt team over the last three years.

After creating the Checkout category from scratch, processing billions in transaction volume for thousands of Bolt merchants and millions of Bolt shoppers, it's hard to believe that Bolt still has so much room to run. But they do, and Activant will be excited to back them every step of the way.

Leading the Series B and participating in the Series C round we helped Bolt raise the funds they needed to grow.

Fundraising

We helped to develop the sales team required to drive SMB and enterprise sales.

Operations

Activant’s network and ecosystem introduced the team to new opportunities.

Introductions

The cornerstone of e-commerce is choice. As a brand, you not only have to offer a differentiated product but a seamless buying experience.
For brands and retailers operating outside of the Amazon platform, the technology that powers the e-commerce experience today is simply not flexible enough to meet shopper expectations. Shoppers demand a frictionless interaction, but like in many other industries, the legacy infrastructure behind e-commerce and retail is outdated. We know this firsthand as investors in the original e-commerce platform, Hybris.

Retailers need to reconstruct their customer checkout journey while protecting themselves against fraud, costly chargebacks and liabilities. But independent brands face significant structural disadvantages to Amazon. With new customers shopping each day, they don’t have the same advantage of saved accounts, profiles, aggregated data, and verified details that Amazon’s economies of scale provide.

At Activant, we are always searching for companies that empower independent retailers to better compete with companies like Amazon. There’s tremendous opportunity around applying technology to the checkout and solving for the fraud problem faced by independent retailers. We also get particularly excited about companies with innovative go-to-market or monetization models where they truly flip the economics of an industry. This is why we are excited to announce our investment in 

Bolt is fundamentally shifting the economics behind e-commerce retail by helping merchants avoid the tradeoff that exists today between fraud exposure and purchase conversion rates.

Through its end-to-end checkout platform with full chargeback protection, Bolt improves conversion rates and order approval by up to 15%, while eliminating fraud.

Bolt bypasses this internal friction by selling directly to business leaders as a single plug-and-play solution that maximizes revenue through increased checkout conversion and reduced false positive chargebacks. Bolt’s fraud prevention technology is unparalleled because their horizontal integration enables them to capture thousands of data points across the entire checkout process leading to increased chargeback precision and lower fraud costs.

At over $1 billion of annualized payment processing volume, Bolt has completed more than 1.5 MM transactions through the platform and helped customers realize more than $25 MM in new revenue.

Bolt is the glue that powers a holistic buying experience and connects dozens of disparate tools.

Brands choosing not to pay prohibitive selling fees on Amazon end up piecing together standalone point solutions for checkout, payments, and fraud, a hodgepodge of necessary solutions that don’t always fit well together and require substantial engineering resources. Checkout requires seamless integrations between not just these three components, but also subcomponents like coupons, discounts, loyalty, gift certificates, and back office operations. Checkout is the glue connecting all of these services. And building this glue is something that retailers struggle with.

Piecing together disparate point solutions also results in siloed data across systems that don’t speak to one another. Merchants experience this pain acutely between their payment and fraud systems, where customers are redirected across multiple steps, resulting in declined transactions and cart abandonment.

Checkout speed is measured in seconds, clicks, data entry fields, and redirects. At 34 seconds, 4 clicks, 12 fields and zero redirects, Bolt’s checkout is faster across all vectors. By comparison, Shopify checkout takes up to 69 seconds, 4 clicks, 15 fields, and 4 redirects. Bolt has line of sight to reach one-click checkout in the near future, resulting in a meaningful uplift in customer conversion for their merchants.

Beyond the technology, we are continually impressed by the Bolt management team’s ability to cultivate the top engineering and tech talent. This year, Bolt hired over 100 talented teammates from Google, Facebook, Uber, Twitter, Airbnb, and Square. Bolt’s culture has been recognized by 

Inc. Magazine’s Best Workplaces in 2019

 and the company was named as one of the 

Leading 100 Breakout Startups by The Lead

We are excited to partner with Bolt as they transform the payments landscape by offering best-in-class checkout and fraud, with the goal of one-click checkout for the universe of independent brands.

Today, Bolt announced that it has raised a $68 million Series B financing to perfect the checkout experience for online retailers.

 We at Activant Capital led the round along with Tribe Capital, with support from retail executives at Allbirds, REVOLVE, Jet.com and Bombas.

Why we’re investing in Bolt.

Perfecting the checkout experience for online retailers

Read our investment thesis

Bolt

Founders who aspire to build something bigger than themselves chose to partner with us at their most critical point.

Founded in 2015, Activant is a global investment firm with $1.5 B AUM that partners with high-growth founders and teams that are transforming commerce.

We’re always looking to learn about new perspectives, new research, and new ideas.

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Activant is a research-led global investment firm that partners with high-growth companies.

We partner with founders who have won their initial battles and are ready for the next challenge.

We typically invest when two things come together. First, the company has the potential to achieve escape velocity and transform an entire industry. Second, we believe the founders can lead the company through hyper growth, and our support can significantly increase the probability of this success. 

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Building a shopping community by solving the biggest pain point in e-commerce.

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