The Ledger
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Villig: VCs refused to invest in Bolt at $25M ARR
“We probably got to the point of doing about twenty-five million ARR, growing multiple hundred percent a year, and still no VCs wanted to invest.”
Lemkin: Bolt Outsourced Its AI Agent to Claude and Fell to Third
“So even Bolt, which was the early leader, they're now just at number three, They don't even have an AI agent anymore. They've outsourced it to Claude.”
Villig: AV developers like Waymo will not operate ride-hailing fleets long-term
“My view is that most of these companies Like Waymo over the longterm don't want to operate a car network. It's just too much hassle. So I think that these companies can build what they're fantastic at, which is building the software. And then there's going to …”
Bolt Scaled From Zero to $20M Revenue in Two Months
“We're seeing examples like Bolt, you know, which went zero to 20 in two months”
Markus Villig: Bolt has reached $2 billion in annual recurring revenue
“And then we went from that to now we have two billion ARR in sort of the next few years.”
Villig: Bolt raised $1.5B while competitors raised up to $30B
“There's about seven companies left. What they've been doing better than us is raising money. They've just all raised multitudes of how much we have raised. Many of them have raised five billion. Some of them have raised 15, even thirty billion. Well, we have r…”
Villig: Johannesburg became over half of Bolt's business in six months
“In six months, Johannesburg went from being zero to being more than half the business just from scratch. With one local student running the whole operation.”
Villig: Bolt is Europe's largest micromobility operator by fleet size
“We became overnight from being, having almost no presence in that sector to becoming the largest micro-mobile to operate in Europe. Still to this day, nobody operates with such a big fleet in so many cities.”
Villig: Bolt plans to launch dining scan-to-pay payments next
“So the one I'm currently bullish about is dining payments. So in many parts of Europe and the world, it's actually not a common thing that you can scan the QR code, you see the menu, you can order and pay from that. And you can integrate it with everything els…”
Lemkin: Cursor, Bolt, and Windsurf struggled for years before exploding
“I mean, I know Cursor almost died, right? Bolt almost died, right? And then finally it hit for Cursor. I don't know the whole story of Windsurf. Even Windsurf was Codium before it, right? It wasn't even the same, like everyone talks about Windsurf. 90 days ago…”
Bolt reached thousands of daily trips in year one on $5,000 capital
“We bootstrapped the company completely for about the first year. So we built the product, we got to some thousands of daily trips and we did all of that with 5000 bucks for my parents.”
Daimler invested over 100 million dollars in Bolt at 1B valuation
“So then we managed to convince them that they invested more than a hundred million at the billion dollar valuation. So it went in a year from being an acquisition to being an investment.”
Bolt defined ride-hailing category in Poland, Czechia, and Baltics
“In Poland or in Czech or in the Baltics, we were the ones who defined the category and the regulators were then coming to us and were asking us for input.”
Villig: Bolt grew from zero to $100M ARR in under five years
“We went from zero to two million ARR in about 18 months, and then from there we went to about ten million ARR in the next 18 months, and then we went from that to a hundred million ARR in less than two years.”
Bolt scaled to €10M ARR on a €1M seed round
“So we raised about one million of an annual of the first seed fund, and then we built the company to ten million ARR with that.”
Bolt lost 85% of its $200M revenue within four weeks during COVID
“So COVID hit, and in four weeks we went from just massive, like, about two hundred million of revenues to losing 85% of that.”
Villig: Bolt raised $1M bridge round from non-tech local businesses
“So, so we cobbled together half a million from this real estate company. Similarly, a couple of 100,000 from a local railway operator couple of 100,000 from a local telecoms guy. So it was just this tiny, all together, maybe one million bucks.”