Maju Kuruvilla is no longer CEO of the one-click payment company Screw. He is replaced by Justin Grooms, Bolt's global sales director, who is now interim CEO, according to Grooms' LinkedIn profile.
kuruvilla He didn't have much to say about the change, but he confirmed it both in LinkedIn and xpublishing, simply “One-click payment from @screw! Go ahead” with a rocket emoji. (He declined to comment further.) Arjun Sethi, co-founder of the venture firm Tribal capitalcommented on his LinkedIn post, noting that the executive was “amazing to work with.”
Bolt's board of directors reportedly “voted to oust him this weekend.” Information reported.
Kuruvilla, the former Amazon executive took over as CEO in January 2022, after founder Ryan Breslow resigned.
Grooms joined Bolt five years ago after holding executive positions at companies including Ultraleap (formerly Leap Motion), Datron World Communications and Qualcomm, his LinkedIn says. The company told The Information that the CEO's role had changed and said Kuruvilla's departure was “amicable” but did not provide further details.
Bolt is no stranger to controversy. Its founder, who was 27 years old at the time, Breslow, founded the company after dropping out of Stanford. He stepped down as CEO in January 2022 and was generally known for his very outspoken rants.
In an interview with Connie Loizos of TechCrunch That same month, he said the company had signed approximately 10 major deals in the second half of 2021, each of which was larger “than any Bolt has previously signed in the company's history.”
But then the company faced some difficulties. Screw At some point it was the subject of a federal investigation involving Breslow and whether the company violated any securities laws during fundraising in 2021. That's when Bolt was looking for a Series E round of 355 million dollars that valued the company at $11 billion. The company raised around a billion dollars in total venture-backed financing.
And there were several rounds of layoffs, including one in May 2022 when it was reported that at least 185 employees, or a third of its workforce, were laid off. Then another in early 2023 and one in December 2023 which affected 29% of its staff.
In October, Kuruvilla, then CEO, told TechCrunch that the SEC was no longer investigating Bolt and that was working towards profitability and had some new features in the works, such as improving merchandise returns and providing personalized experiences around its universal network of shoppers. The company announced partnerships with retailers, including Saks OFF 5TH, Shinola, Filson, Lafayette 148 and Toys “R” Us, in November.
More recently, Bolt signed a deal with payment in which Bolt became Checkout.com's “exclusive one-click payment provider” and Checkout.com became “Bolt's preferred payment partner.”
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