68. Bolt

Company: Bolt 

Founder: Eric Feldman and Ryan Breslow

Website: www.bolt.com

Business: A platform helping to improve the process of online checkouts.

 

About Bolt

Founded in 2014, Bolt, self-professed as a “better-than-Amazon checkout experience for the rest of the internet”,  was initially created focusing on digital currency within the online checkout process – co-founder Ryan Breslow leaving Stanford to focus on developing this idea with Eric Feldman. However, whilst pursing this business venture, the focus shifted away from digital currency, and explored other ways to advance the online checkout experience. Breslow states:

“E-commerce has this philosophy of layering on tools, and that layering creates fragmentation”

“This insight we had at Bolt is that the more fragmented this space becomes, the worse performing online retailers become, and the more market share Amazon is going to gain.”

To help in tackling this problem, Bolt has developed an innovative platform, helping retailers to optimise their checkout experience. This includes speeding up the checkout process, reducing the amount of fields customers will typically need to fill in to complete purchases, and offering checkout registration after payment has taken place, and not before (which Breslow claims leads to a staggering 40% drop-off).

In addition to this, Bolt’s platform also eliminates the need for customers to enter in their billing address, claimed to only be used as a way of reducing fraud, and a fairly useless one at that.

Incorporated into the startup’s E-commerce services is also sales analysis and fraud prevention. In fact, Bolt back its fraud detection so much to the point it will cover 100% of fraud-induced chargebacks.

Since its launch, the startup have raised a total of $90.1 million in funding, their last round in July of last year securing a whopping $68 million.