Bolt Shakes Up C-Suite, Appoints New CEO

Bolt founder, Ryan Breslow, has stepped down as the chief executive of the company, after seven years of serving in the role.

Breslow plans to continue to work for the company as the executive chairman of its board, focussing on fueling the platform’s growth through fundraising, acquisitions and partnerships.

Maju Kuruvilla, the company’s chief operating officer (COO), is taking over the reigns as the new CEO. Kuruvilla joined the company back in 2019 as its chief product and technology officer and was appointed as the company’s COO in August of 2020. Prior to joining Bolt, Kuruvilla spent seven years at Amazon, where he helped scale Amazon’s worldwide Prime logistics and fulfillment business as a vice president and general manager. He also has experience working for Microsoft, Honeywell, and Milliman.

“Maju’s a brilliant systems thinker, a great culture builder and he just gets the job done,” said Breslow.

The shakeup follows a slew of tweets from Breslow’s account on January 24, 2022, about rival Stripe and startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC), calling them “mob bosses” that make “every power move imaginable” to crush competitors. In his Tweets, Breslow also accused Stripe of deliberately funding a direct competitor of Bolt. Overall, Breslow’s rant gained some decent attention, garnering nearly 9,000 “likes” on Twitter.

Breslow’s departure from the checkout and shopper network platform comes at a time when the company is raising funding, which is expected to value the firm at $14 billion — $3 billion more than the valuation it received earlier this month when it closed a $355 million Series E funding round.

To date, Bolt has raised funding from BlackRock, Schonfeld, Invus Opportunities, HIG Growth, CE Innovation Capital, Tribe Capital, Untitled Investments, General Atlantic, Activant Capital and various other partners.

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Originally published at https://retailbum.com on February 1, 2022.