Bolt value at $4.76 billion pushing into on-demand grocery delivery

On Monday, European ride-hailing company Bolt said that it raised 600 million euros, equal to $713 million in fresh funding. This seems to be due to it pushing into the growing online grocery delivery industry.

The new investment round valued Bolt at around $4.76 billion, more than double $2 billion.

On Monday, Bolt’s founder and CEO, Markus Villig, told CNBC in an interview that a year ago, they experienced the most significant crisis. They dropped more than 80% as all the cities went into lockdown, and ride-hailing was still the main business.

Villig added that their company has changed in the last 18 months, and since then, Ride-hailing has fully recovered.

Delivery grew from a small business into one of the fastest-growing food delivery companies in Europe.

Overview of a company

Bolt is formerly known as Taxify, which started as a taxi-hailing app in Estonia. After that, the company moved its branches into several new services, including car-sharing, food delivery, and electric scooter and bike rentals.

Now, Bolt tries to make a big drive into grocery delivery. The company promises to deliver groceries in just 15 minutes. It also plans to add this service to 10 European countries in the next few months, including Portugal, Sweden, Croatia and Romania.

Grocery delivery is a strongly competitive sector, especially in Europe, where several different on-demand shopping apps are developing with billions of dollars in investment capital. Turkey’s Getir is one of the leading players in the market, with a value of $7.6 billion.

Villig said his company might need billions of euros of investment in the next few years as it tries to become a super app with multiple services involving different industries.

He told CNBC that this plan would require huge capital. He added that they do not need to raise billions of funding during the following years to accelerate.