Bolt Nets $75 Million In Funding Round For eCommerce Innovation

Checkout platform Bolt has closed a funding round with $75 million, capping a year where it processed $1 billion in transactions, according to a report by Venture Beat.

Bolt also saw a tenfold increase in the size of its shopper network, along with 250,000 added shoppers to its network per month. The round saw the company’s valuation hit over $215 million. The round was led by General Atlantic and WestCap, and existing investors Activant Capital and Tribe Capital also participated.

Bolt was founded in 2014 in San Francisco and works on tools to streamline web transactions. While it initially focused on currency in online checkouts, the company has branched out to work on checkout and fraud detection, integrating with companies like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and Salesforce Commerce Cloud, according to the the report.

Bolt deals with fraud reduction through detecting mouse pointer locations, typing speed and accuracy, copying and pasting behavior, and other data surrounding browsing, cart and checkout. Customers flagged as being possibly malicious can also appeal and prove that they aren’t, the report says.

Because of a preprocessing technique letting elements load in less than a second, Bolt is able to achieve efficiency, the report says. Customers don’t have to enter a billing address and the mobile experience is no-scroll and above the fold, with a post-checkout registration model letting customers wait until after checkout to sign up for an account.

There has been a surge in eCommerce this year because of the pandemic, at the expense of in-person shopping as people tried to stay clear of the coronavirus. Data from the IBM U.S. Retail Index showed that this accelerated the digital shift by five years, with eCommerce transactions for grocery orders alone hitting $5.9 billion, the report says.

Fraud is becoming more sophisticated and businesses need to learn to combat it. Kount‘s Gary Sevounts told PYMNTS recently that more advanced ways are needed to look at accounts, assessing whether even verified accounts are trustworthy through looking at email addresses, card numbers and more.