Can Bolt, with CEO Maju Kuruvilla, compete against Shopify, Stripe and others
Maju Kuruvilla, CEO Bolt, on right
September 30, 2022
One of the key ways for vendors to expand their online sales is to make it easy for shoppers to select and pay for items. Nearly three out of four shoppers abandon a purchase placed in their online cart and a quarter buy the product from a rival online vendor, according to CoreSight News. Enabling a shopper to easily make an online purchase “matters now more than ever for retailers,” Maju Kuruvilla, Chief Executive of Bolt, tweeted this week. Fixing the customer check-out process, he added, “or switching to @bolt - is the best option to boost sales.”
Bolt sells software to businesses which enable customers to make online purchases with a one-click checkout experience, similar to the technology that has, in part, driven Amazon’s growth. Bolt’s products are used by more than 300 companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia, including Eyeglasses.com, Polywood, a vendor of outdoor furniture, Spice Jungle, a vendor of food items, and Larson, a jewelry vendor.
Bolt has more than 1,000 employees with headquarters in San Francisco and offices in Salt Lake City, United States, and Stockholm, Sweden. But more than half its employees work remotely from several states in the U.S., all provinces in Canada and London, United Kingdom, Barcelona, Spain, and Wrocklaw, Poland. Enabling employees to work remotely gives Bolt the ability to hire talent from a wider pool than in the areas where its offices are located.
Founded in 2014, Bolt launched its first merchant with just the payment step two years later. Kuruvilla, 45 years old, joined Bolt in January 2021 as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO); seven months later he became the Chief Operating Officer; and in February 2022 he was named CEO.
From 2013 to 2020, he was at Amazon, including as Vice President and General Manager for Amazon’s Global Logistics, managing business, product, engineering, and operations for the unit, which has thousands of employees. Earlier, he managed the technology teams for Amazon Prime fulfillment.
“It can’t be denied that Amazon has changed consumer expectations for shopping online and raised the bar for retailers,” Ryan Breslow, founder of Bolt and Chairman of the Board, said in a statement at the time of Kuruvilla’s hiring last year. Bolt is creating software that seeks to offer Amazon’s instant, one-click checkout experience to other retailers. Kuruvilla “played a critical role in scaling the products and technology that power worldwide Amazon Prime Fulfillment…(he) not only has the technological expertise required to serve as our CTO, but he also understands the retailer and its complex set of needs,” Breslow added.
Earlier, from 2003 to 2013, Kuruvilla was the CTO at Milliman, a Seattle area company that sells software for payment transactions between hospitals and insurance companies. From 2001 to 2003, he worked at Microsoft, also in the Seattle area; and from 1999 to 2001 at Honeywell as a software engineer. He started his career in 1998 as a Research Associate at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Kuruvilla has three patents in his name, including ones for wearable passive scanning device and wireless-based real-time movement tracking. He holds an MBA from the University of Washington and a BS in Computer Engineering from Mangalore University, India. He runs and plays soccer and has two children.
Bolt has raised nearly $1 billion in venture funding, mostly in two recent rounds in 2021 and this year, from BlackRock, General Atlantic and other institutional investors. “It may seem like a lot of money raised, but actually no, this is capital for us to be competitive…We don’t just want to be on par with competitors, but be better,” Bolt founder Breslow told TechCrunch in January, after its most recent fund raising round which valued the company at $11 billion.
In hindsight, Bolt’s fund raise was also opportunistically timed, being completed just before funding for most ventures dried up starting this year, following the decline in equity markets.
While the potential markets for Bolt’s software products are massive, it indeed faces several, better-funded and larger competitors including Shopify, based in Ottawa, Canada; Stripe, based in San Francisco, which was valued at $95 billion at its last funding round in 2021; and Checkout.com, based in London, UK, which was valued at $40 billion during its last funding round in January this year.
The sharp decline in equity markets this year, especially technology stocks, has led to a slashing in the valuations of software as well as numerous other companies, both public and private. Shopify, for instance, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, is currently valued at $34 billion, down 85% from its peak valuation of $225 billion in 2021.
Bolt is using the funds it has raised to launch new products which will offer any business the ability to track orders, enable fast shipping and returns and provide discounts and other benefits to members, in addition to one-click checkout – replicating the “Amazon gold standard” buying experience, Breslow told TechCrunch..
In April 2022, Bolt agreed to buy Wyre, a cryptocurrency infrastructure provider, for $1.5 billion. “With Bolt and Wyre coming together, we can make crypto easily accessible for merchants just like we make all the credit cards and all the alternate payments easily accessible,” Kuruvilla told CNBC. Following the acquisition, which is expected to close by this year-end, “Both consumers and retailers will benefit from a friction-free buying experience that supports crypto and NFT natively,” Kuruvilla noted in a statement.
When he joined Bolt as CTO last year, Kuruvilla said in a statement that, with the technical team’s caliber and world class engineers, “Bolt is well positioned to master one of the most complex and critical aspects of e-commerce: the checkout. I believe the company is still in its chapter one, and I am ready to play a key part in chapter two and beyond.”
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