Bolt raises $450M at $14B valuation | Hacker News Reader

Bolt raises $450M at $14B valuation

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32 pointsprakhar8976 comments

I see a ton of comments worriedly mentioning how this affects employees, but I don’t understand how it affects employees — can someone give an ELI5?

It sounds like they require stock owners to double the number of stocks purchased — does this mean employees with RSUs have to take part in the raise to keep their stock? Are RSUs even the right concept to think of here?

To be honest, I don't really see how it affects employees either, they've had multiple rounds of layoffs, their peak valuation was $11Bn and they got to the point where they were offering a share buyback program at a valuation of $300m. I don't see how any employee at this point could be expecting any value to the equity they got by working there. Having said that, after this funding I would expect the CEO to probably issue new incentive plans to employees because otherwise what are they even trying to do.

The real people getting screwed are previous investors who are basically being told they either have to put a tonne of new money in at an incredibly rich valuation or their existing holding is going to be diluted to 0. I don't see how you could possibly value the company like that and the fact that they're using this lever to force it likely means they think that actually what they can do is either get a very rich valuation from their hostages (prior investors) or kill the hostages (wipe out their equity and hand their share of the company over to the new investors). The result would either be a very generous funding round or a lower valuation in total because the new equity in would be getting a larger share of the company for their investment. In fact the rich valuation may be explicitly designed to do this - prevent prior investors from re-upping so that they can wipe out their stake.

It's clear that the returning CEO left with bad blood so I could imagine the structure of this was deliberate to screw the old investors who turfed him out in the first place.

> they got to the point where they were offering a share buyback program at a valuation of $300m

That was just earlier this year. It seems weird that the company that valued itself that low is now raising at a valuation 40x higher a few months later?

They might require existing preferred stock owners to buy in. But common stock holders may be getting crammed down somehow.

Interesting to see what the end game is here. Is the goal to prevent a hostile takeover by competitors?

It's a Growth/PE-lead deal with Ryan returning as CEO.

Either he'll execute and help Bolt hit the metrics needed to IPO, or the fund will spin it off or sell it to another fund or company.

Either way the terms are very generous for the two unnamed funds.

I think Index Ventures and ADIA (making an e-commerce push recently) are the two partners because of their e-commerce heavy portfolios, can justify unlocking one-click pay within their portfolio, and can protect Revolut from Klarna's recent expansion into neobanking.

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