Bolt is raising up to $27M in convertible note bridge funding led by existing investors to aid its transition towards a Series E2 round and address legacy obligations.

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As a measure of its growth, in August, when the company announced that previous round, it had 75 million customers. Bolt now has more than 100 million customers in 45 countries and 400+ cities using its services. Bolt was founded eight years ago in Tallinn, Estonia (originally as Taxify), with a mission to bring ride hailing to emerging markets and countries where others like Uber had yet to gain a strong foothold, a strategy that it used to expand modestly across regions like Central and Eastern Europe and Africa, in the process attracting investors like China’s Didi — itself having built a massive business in its own home emerging market. (Didi quietly divested its stake in Bolt last year.)Over time, the focus has remained on Europe and Africa, but Bolt found that a lot of its learnings from those first launches could just as easily be applied in more developed countries, with more lucrative payoffs. “We started off in Eastern Europe and Africa because those markets had a bigger need.