With e-commerce taking off amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolt, the payment technology platform company, is raising $ 50 million in a new round of venture capital funding.

The Series C financing was led by Laurence Tosi at WestCap and included participation from existing investors Activant Capital, Tribe Capital, Glynn Capital and Human Capital.

With the last round of funding Lock has raised a total of $ 140 million since its inception in 2014. The e-commerce tech startup will not disclose its valuation following the capital injection except to say that it was ‘a “material amount”. Last summer, Bolt raised $ 68 million in a Series B funding round.

The new funding comes as e-commerce experiences a huge surge in demand amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Online shopping was already a growing trend, but the pandemic has accelerated the pace of adoption. With shelter-in-place orders, people around the world were forced to buy everything from food to swimming pools online. They had no choice but to get used to e-commerce and now they’re addicted. “The brick and mortar was already on thin ice,” said Ryan Breslow, founder and CEO of Bolt. “COVID accelerated it. “

Bolt’s Cloud Platform Combines Payment, Payments, and Fraud Protection in One Product to Help Retailers Better Compete with Amazon

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that perfected the one-click shopping experience. In the past two years, turnover has tripled from the previous year, and by mid-2020 this growth rate has already been achieved. Breslow predicts Bolt will end the year with a five-fold increase in sales from last year. This is driven by the urgent change on the part of retailers to sell online. “Many customers are seeing record sales rates as a result of new online investments. There are a lot of new customers, ”Bolt CEO said.

Bolt isn’t the only fintech raising capital during the pandemic. In June, Varo Money, the mobile banking startup, raised $ 241 million in venture capital. Much like Bolt, Varo has seen an increase in business and, more importantly, a change in behavior as a result of COVID-19.

_{Bolt wants to help retailers of all sizes}

Aiming to capitalize on the shift to e-commerce, Bolt also announced the launch of its payment experience platform, which provides retailers with a technology stack to manage all aspects of payment. Through the platform, Bolt said retailers can present payment options, process payments securely, reduce fraud and improve shopping cart conversion rates. The latter is important since 70% of online sales are lost at the checkout. Breslow says Bolt’s platform can improve this and speed up the checkout process, cutting the time spent on its customers’ websites in half.

“People have more options than ever before when shopping online, and retailers need to deliver the best experience or customers will move on,” said Laurence Tosi, former CFO of Airbnb and founder of Westcap. “And the stakes are particularly high right now. Businesses around the world have no choice but to go digital, and I have no doubts that this infusion of new capital will accelerate Bolt towards his goal of empowering the majority of independent e-commerce by 2025. ”

Proceeds from the fundraising cycle will be used to develop smarter checkout conversion products, improve the approval engine, hire engineers, and expand partner onboarding. “With retailers relying on us to deepen functionality, all of that funding is to make sure that merchants are stronger,” Breslow said. “We are in a lucky space. Investors understand that trade is moving at an unprecedented rate. It took ten years for e-commerce to jump 11% and eight weeks during the pandemic for the next 11% growth. “