“Can Bolt embed financial services — payments, lending, insurance, and business tools — deeply enough into its ride-hailing and food-delivery platform to become the financial OS for European gig workers and SMB merchants?”
Founded in 2013 as Taxify, a basic taxi-hailing app in Estonia, Bolt rebranded in 2019 and rapidly diversified into food delivery, grocery delivery, e-scooters, e-bikes, and car-sharing to compete with Uber and Deliveroo across emerging and European markets. Its embedded finance story began with payments infrastructure for rides and food, and expanded in 2025 when it partnered with finmid to offer working-capital loans to restaurant partners on Bolt Food — moving toward becoming a financial services layer for the SMB merchants and gig-economy drivers on its platform.