Bolt.new

Build full apps and websites in seconds

November 17th, 2025

Happy Monday.

We first met Bolt CEO Eric Simons at Bolt’s SF launch party with the Chainsmokers in May. Six months later, we’re excited to bring Bolt’s founding story (and our analysis) to Unicorner.

Interested in what the team is building? We’re hosting a future of product dinner in SF on December 9 with Eric and the Bolt team. Spots are extremely limited. You can apply to join us here.

ICYMI: We announced our official investor syndicate on Friday. Check out the announcement post for more details and how to join.

Arek and Ethan 🦄

Bolt is a platform for building apps and websites with frontier AI agents. Users can build an end-to-end user experience, including a frontend UI, backend logic, and a database, from a single prompt. They can alternatively begin a project by importing an existing GitHub codebase or Figma file. Once in the interactive builder, users can modify their creation with additional prompting.

Bolt handles the key steps that make up all successful software, including the UI, backend, storage, and deployment. It also takes care of essentials, such as optimizing SEO and incorporating a design system, out of the box. Altogether, this means users can go from an idea to a production-ready application in under a minute (yes, we timed it).

Check it out: bolt.new

Bolt offers every feature to create and share apps and websites for free. Users have access to unlimited databases, website hosting, and 300 thousand credits per day/1 million tokens per month. Bolt offers Pro and Team plans that include additional tokens, but all its core features are available for free to everyone. Enterprises can contact the company about the Enterprise plan, which includes advanced security, dedicated 24/7 support, and more.

  • Raised $105.5 million Series B led by Emergence Capital and Google Ventures, with participation from Mantis VC (The Chainsmokers), Conviction, and more

  • Went from $0 to $20 million ARR in just two months

  • Achieved impressive metrics with just 45 employees

Bolt’s founding story contains one of the most interesting pivots in startups, up there with Notion and Netflix. 

Before Bolt, Eric Simons and Albert Pai were founders running another darling Silicon Valley company: StackBlitz. StackBlitz let developers quickly spin up online collaborative coding environments, reaching $700 thousand ARR at its peak. But after seven years of operating on that mission, StackBlitz was on the verge of bankruptcy.

With the end in sight, Simons and Pai had to make a choice. Should they continue what they were doing, knowing their numbers were dwindling, and hope for a miracle? Or should they pivot, giving up what they had fought seven years to achieve, for the minuscule chance that they could turn things around?

The two chose the second option. They put their resources behind half a dozen experiments. One of these experiments was a hacked-together, AI-first coding tool. Users were presented with a simple question: “What will you build today?”

That app was Bolt, and people flocked to it immediately. With numbers skyrocketing, they had saved the company from bankruptcy. Within just two months, they were making $20 million ARR with no signs of slowing down.

There are few companies that have been able to capture both the attention of the startup community and customers quite like Bolt. You can’t find a corner of the X tech community where Bolt isn’t mentioned. Outside of tech, many know of, and have used, Bolt. And for good reason. Bolt offers an ingenious product, and does it really well. 

Using Bolt’s platform is genuinely magical. Right now, any one of us can visit Bolt’s website and build a complete application with a couple of keystrokes and a click. Imagine having a fully functioning website deployed and ready to share in less time than it takes to brew your morning coffee. For developers (like ourselves), this reduces development time by at least 100x, even with years of experience coding eight hours a day. For the non-technical among us, a four-year university education or bootcamp is no longer a barrier of entry to creating a technical product for customers, fashioning a tool for your day job, or starting that side project. The next generation of builders will not be who you expect, and they will be powered by Bolt.

Rarely does a company come by that can build a product that anyone can use. And by anyone, we really mean anyone. For example, the smartphone was that for businesses and consumers alike. At the same time, few companies can establish foundational layers across industries, as Amazon’s AWS has as the backbone of the internet or OpenAI has for AI. Companies like these transform almost every industry. Bolt checks both boxes, empowering people of all skill levels across any industry with the most convenient, powerful, and democratized software-creation platform ever invented.

Eric Simons and Catherine Goetze (CatGPT) at our fireside

However, any company is built from the sum of its parts: that is, the people. In this regard, Bolt is an example of the grit it takes to succeed. The team had to pivot from StackBlitz, a challenging and remarkable decision. Those of us who are founders know this struggle very well. Simons himself touched on it at our fireside panel, describing the feeling as a “you versus you” battle while viewing competition as “free R&D.”

Bolt’s challenge isn’t finding customers. The team already sees the love for their product; that quickly becomes apparent after a few minutes in their community Discord with nearly 100 thousand members. Their biggest charge is meeting the demands of so many unique use cases, something they have consistently excelled at.

There’s the solo founder who used to spend weeks begging friends for engineering help; now they have iterated through multiple MVPs and have a complete product live after a single weekend. There’s the product manager or designer who used to stop at Figma mockups and now ships fully functional products for clients. None of these people would have called themselves “developers” before Bolt. They do now.

The question remains… what will you build today?