To our partners,
When we first engaged with Bolt in late 2018, the company had built two products:
- A streamlined online checkout that would allow merchants to offer their customers an Amazon-like purchasing experience
- Chargeback protection, in which Bolt would freeze fraudulent transactions while insuring the rest against chargebacks.
Selling to small businesses — particularly those in high-churn sectors like ecommerce — is typically tough sledding. Despite the challenges, what gave us the conviction to back Ryan was the shared realization that Bolt has the potential to become an N-of-1 company, using its checkout as a wedge to build an entirely new product category in ecommerce. Since we invested, Bolt has done just that, growing its total transaction volume over seven times (from $15MM to over $110MM in monthly transactions) in the last year and a half.
Today, we are excited to announce that Bolt has taken two big steps towards realizing this vision. Bolt has closed a Series C led by Westcap and it has launched its second-act product: user profiles with over 2 million accounts to date.
They’re calling it a Checkout Experience Platform, to define the new product category and establish their leadership in it.
Consumers who check out on any Bolt-powered merchant’s site will now have personalized Bolt accounts which enable a streamlined checkout experience across all other merchants that use Bolt Checkout. For Bolt merchants, user profiles will provide them with customer relationship management tools and insights beyond what even Amazon could build. (Imagine a merchant using Bolt to not only identify fraudulent actors, but also high-value customers, coupon clippers, customers with abandoned shopping carts, and so on.)
We are excited to continue supporting Ryan and his team as they realize Bolt’s N-of-1 potential, and we look forward to sharing more updates on their progress over the coming years.
To learn more about how we think about N of 1 companies, please view our FAQ
We’re a venture capital firm focused on recognizing and amplifying early stage product-market fit. Reach us at hello@tribecap.co.
