Bolt, a San Francisco-based ecommerce checkout startup that aims to give ecommerce and DTC companies an Amazon-like experience at the bottom of the funnel, has raised $68 million in a Series B round, bringing its total venture raise to $90 million.
Bolt’s cloud-based platform combines checkout, payments and fraud prevention. It’s in a crowded ecommerce checkout and payments field with leaders including PayPal, Square, Payoneer, Stripe, Braintree and Bluesnap, all looking to help DTC players large and small reduce checkout friction and increase conversions as they push back against the ecommerce Goliath.
The new funding round was led by Activant Capital and Tribe Capital Invest, with support from executives at Allbirds, REVOLVE, Jet.com and Bombas and former executives from Crocs, Athleta and Forever 21, among others.
CEO Ryan Breslow said in a blog post that the company is processing payments at an annualized rate of over $1 billion, has handled more than 1.5 million transactions and helped customers realize more than $25 million in new revenue since Bolt’s January 2018 launch.
“Amazon dominates online retail in the US, representing over half of the market share due to its ultra-convenient and streamlined buying experience,” Breslow said in the blog post. “However, the rest of the retail space lags far behind in their buying experience, and is at a significant disadvantage. Bolt hopes to level the playing field by giving everyone who’s not Amazon that same level of sophistication without any technical resources needed on their end.”
The company has also expanded from 10 employees in a loft to over 125 in three offices, hiring talent from companies like Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest and Braintree.
“Bolt is the first company to give online retailers a single product for managing the most important part of their business: Checkout,” said Steven R. Sarracino, Founder & Partner, Activant Capital, in the blog post. “They’ve assembled the most elite product and engineering team I’ve ever seen to tackle some of the biggest problems in online retail, and have a breakthrough approach to fraud detection and checkout speed. The moment I was introduced to Bolt, I knew immediately that the company would be the missing piece of the ecommerce ecosystem that we’ve been waiting for.”