From a dream and a €5,000 loan from his parents in 2013, Bolt has grown into a global ride-sharing platform with annual revenues of over €2 billion. Today, Bolt is present in 50 countries and is the number one operator in more than 20 of them.
Bolt founder and CEO Marcus Willig told Harry Stebbings about this on the 20VC tech podcast.
What Bolt offers today
Marcus Willig noted that Bolt provides mobility and offers car hailing, car sharing, electric scooter and e-bike rental, as well as food and grocery delivery to more than 200 million users in 600 cities around the world.
In his opinion, the rapid development is primarily driven by the team, which has been a key factor in Bolt’s success over the years, and talent in Europe can give a head start to colleagues in Silicon Valley.
“I don’t necessarily agree that you can’t do world-class marketing or engineering from Europe,” said Willig. “In our experience, what has worked much better is bringing in people from Europe who are really talented and hardworking, but just never had the opportunity to compete on the world stage before. These are people who have actually built the company and grown with it – it’s a completely different mentality than hiring people from Silicon Valley who may move on to something else in two years.”
Autonomous cars
In addition, during the podcast, Marcus highlighted autonomous vehicles (AVs) as an important strategic priority for the business, as he believes that platforms such as Bolt will be crucial to the popularization and distribution of such technologies.
“Ride-hailing companies will really be the best way to bring self-driving cars to market. Some people think that these companies will build their own operations and companies like us will be pushed out of the market. I think these people just don’t have a clue about the complexities involved and how hard it is to scale these kinds of networks. We’ve been building this for 11 years with human drivers, and it’s already hard. If you add the complexity of managing this autonomous work, washing the cars, charging them, etc., I think it’s going to be even more difficult,” the Bolt founder emphasized.
He called for caution when talking about the timing of autonomous car technology’s entry into the market, noting that companies working in this area “need years to create a commercially viable service that is cheaper than ordering a ride in a car with a driver and meets regulatory requirements.”
About Bolt
Bolt is a European super app with more than 200 million customers in more than 50 countries across Europe and Africa (over 600 cities). The company aims to make cities more comfortable for people, not cars, by accelerating the shift from car ownership to shared mobility, offering better alternatives for every use case, including car hailing, car sharing, electric scooter and e-bike rental, and food and grocery delivery.
