At 19, an Estonian borrowed €5,000 from his family and recruited Tallinn taxi drivers face-to-face for an app he had built because the city's taxis were unreliable; twelve years later the company took €2.27 billion in revenue in more than 50 countries and posted its first annual profit — €920,000, a margin of four hundredths of one percent

Markus Villig was 19 in 2013, fresh out of high school in Tallinn, and frustrated with how hard it was to get a reliable taxi in his own city. He borrowed €5,000 from his family to build a first version of an app, then did the unglamorous part himself: walking up to taxi drivers on the street in Tallinn and persuading them, one at a time, to sign up. The company launched as Taxify and rebranded as Bolt in March 2019, taking the name from the electric scooter service it had just launched, a signal, as the company put it at the time, that it saw the future of urban transport as electric and intended to be far more than a taxi app. Existing users didn’t have to do anything; the new name and logo simply appeared the next time they opened the app.

From a taxi app to a five-line business

What Bolt actually is today looks very different from what Villig built in 2013. Ride-hailing still accounts for the large majority of its revenue, 82 percent in 2024, according to figures reported in public company profiles of Bolt, but the company has spent the years since methodically bolting on new verticals, largely by copying its own playbook of arriving in a category cheaper and faster than the incumbent. Bolt Food launched in Tallinn in August 2019 and now operates in more than 80 cities across 20 countries with over 30,000 partner restaurants. Micromobility came earlier, e-scooters in Paris from September 2018 and e-bikes from mid-2020, and by early 2023 had grown into roughly 250,000 shared vehicles across 260 cities in 25 countries. Bolt Drive, a car-sharing service, launched in Tallinn in May 2021 and has since spread to Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Poland, Czechia and Portugal. Bolt Market, a grocery-delivery arm launched the same year, has partnered with the robotics company Starship Technologies on autonomous sidewalk delivery in parts of the Baltics.

A decade of growth without a profit

None of that expansion was cheap, and for most of Bolt’s history it wasn’t profitable either. The company pushed early and aggressively into markets Uber had mostly ignored or arrived in late, establishing itself in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria as early as 2016, and it now operates in more than 850 cities across over 50 countries spanning Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America, with more recent entries into Dubai (December 2024) and the Toronto area (February 2025).

Investors funded that land grab at increasing valuations: Bolt crossed $1 billion, and unicorn status, in May 2018 after a $175 million round led by Daimler, according to TechCrunch’s coverage, then climbed to $2 billion by March 2021, $4.75 billion five months later, and $8.4 billion by January 2022.

Revenue kept climbing through all of it. Profit didn’t.

As recently as 2024, the company’s operating loss was €87.7 million even as revenue grew, a pattern common among ride-hailing and delivery platforms still spending to win market share rather than to defend one already won.

Who was willing to fund a decade of losses

Villig’s own €5,000 loan covered exactly one prototype. Everything after that came from investors willing to bet that Bolt’s low-cost, fast-mover approach would eventually outlast better-funded rivals in the markets it entered. The largest of those rounds closed in January 2022: $709 million, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Fidelity Management and Research, with Whale Rock, D1, G Squared and several other funds also participating, valuing the company at $8.4 billion, according to TechCrunch’s coverage of the round.

Bolt said at the time the money would go toward opening more of the small, city-centre “dark stores” that supply its 15-minute grocery delivery service, and toward pushing further into new geographic markets, the same expansion strategy that had defined the company since Villig first stood on a Tallinn street corner recruiting drivers by hand. That January 2022 round is the most recent outside capital the company has raised at scale; the 2025 results suggest it hasn’t needed another one since.

The first profit, and how thin it was

That changed with the 2025 financial year. According to Bolt’s own results, reported in coverage from Trade with Estonia, the company took €2.27 billion in revenue across more than 50 countries, a 14 percent increase on the year before, and posted its first-ever annual net profit: €920,000. Set against €2.27 billion in revenue, that works out to a margin of roughly four hundredths of one percent, the kind of number that is technically profitable and not much more. Operating profit told a similar story of a company just crossing the line, at €19.5 million, reversed from the prior year’s €87.7 million loss. Villig described the underlying business as having reached a $14 billion gross merchandise value run-rate with two consecutive years of positive cash flow, arguably the more meaningful signal for a company at Bolt’s stage than the net income line itself.

What a four-hundredths-of-a-percent margin actually means

A margin that thin is not really a statement about profitability so much as a statement about intent. Bolt could very plausibly have reported a larger profit by spending less on expansion into new cities and verticals, or a loss by spending slightly more, and appears to have chosen the number closest to zero that still let it say, honestly, that twelve years after a teenager borrowed €5,000 from his family, the company he built no longer needs anyone else’s money to stay in business. It hasn’t settled every question that scale raises, either.

In November 2024, a UK employment tribunal ruled that Bolt’s drivers qualify as workers rather than independent contractors — a ruling on status only, with compensation still to be set at a separate hearing. Leigh Day, the law firm representing roughly 15,000 drivers in the claim, estimates the compensation owed could exceed £200 million, or upwards of £15,000 per driver on average, according to Leigh Day’s own statement. Whether a margin this thin holds, thickens, or gets eaten by exactly that kind of regulatory ruling as Bolt pushes into new cities, verticals and eventually autonomous vehicles is the open question its 2025 results don’t settle either way.