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Bolt’s range of services including ride-hailing, car-sharing, food delivery and electric scooter and bike rentals.
Bolt

LONDON — European ride-hailing firm Bolt said Tuesday that it has raised 600 million euros ($713 million) in fresh funding to push into the rapidly growing online grocery delivery industry.

The new investment round values Bolt at about $4.75 billion, more than double its last private valuation of $2 billion.

Venture capital firm Sequoia and fund managers Tekne and Ghisallo backed the financing, while existing investors G Squared, D1 Capital and Naya increased their holdings.

“Bolt’s mission is to make urban travel affordable and sustainable,” said Markus Villig, Bolt’s CEO and founder. “We are building a future where people are not forced to buy cars that cause traffic and pollution, but use on-demand transport when they actually need it.”

Bolt, formerly known as Taxify, started out as a taxi-hailing app in Estonia. The company has since branched out into several new services, including food delivery, car sharing and electric scooter and bike rentals, hoping to become what’s known as a “super app.”

Now, Bolt is making a big drive into grocery delivery. The company, which promises to deliver groceries in 15 minutes, plans to roll out the service to 10 European countries over the next few months, including Sweden, Portugal, Croatia and Romania.

Grocery delivery is a fiercely competitive sector, particularly in Europe, where several new on-demand shopping apps are emerging with billions of dollars in venture capital behind them.

One of the leading players in the market, Turkey’s Getir, was valued by investors at $7.5 billion in June.

The bump in Bolt’s market value is a boon to early backers like German automaker Daimler and Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi. The company also counts the World Bank and the European Investment Bank as investors.

Like other ride-hailing companies, Bolt was hit with a severe drop in revenues early in the Covid-19 pandemic. It has rapidly grown in recent months as several countries have emerged from lockdowns, and now has more than 75 million users in 45 countries across Europe and Africa.

However, Bolt now faces another source of uncertainty in the U.K. after the country’s Supreme Court ruled Uber drivers should be treated as workers entitled to benefits like a minimum wage and holiday pay.

The case sets a precedent for competing ride-hailing services such as Bolt, Ola and Free Now, which operate a similar business model to Uber.

Uber subsequently reclassified all 70,000 of its U.K. drivers as workers, rather than independent contractors, and is now calling on other operators to do the same.

“It just doesn’t make sense drivers are taking a trip with us in which they are entitled as workers to holiday pay and pensions, and five minutes later because many drivers are multi-app they’re taking a separate trip where they’re not eligible for benefits,” Jamie Heywood, Uber’s regional general manager of Northern and Eastern Europe, told CNBC.

For its part, Bolt has said it has no plans to change its driver arrangements.

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CNBC Daily Open: Too early to fret about tech pullback?

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CNBC Daily Open: Too early to fret about tech pullback?

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on November 07, 2025 in New York City.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images

November is historically the best month for the S&P 500, which gains an average of 1.8% during the period, according to the Stock Trader’s Almanac.

But the first full trading week of the month saw stocks caught in November rains.

The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average each lost more than 1%, while the Nasdaq Composite shed around 3% — that’s its largest weekly loss since the tech-heavy index slumped 10% in the week ended April 4.

A few months ago, tariffs were the shadows that stalked stocks. Now, it’s fears that artificial intelligence-related stocks are trading at prices disconnected from what the firms are actually worth.

“You’ve got trillions of dollars tied up in seven stocks, for example. So, it’s inevitable, with that kind of concentration, that there will be a worry about, ‘You know, when will this bubble burst?‘” CEO of DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, Tan Su Shan told CNBC.

Goldman Sachs’ CEO David Solomon also thinks choppy waters might be ahead.

“It’s likely there’ll be a 10 to 20% drawdown in equity markets sometime in the next 12 to 24 months,” Solomon said Tuesday at the Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit in Hong Kong.

That said, a pullback isn’t necessarily bad for stocks. It could even present “buying opportunities” for investors, according to Glen Smith, chief investment officer at GDS Wealth Management.

After all, earnings have been “reassuring” despite worries about tech stocks’ high valuations, Kiran Ganesh, multi-asset strategist at UBS, told CNBC. That means the rain might not last and the rally could find a way to run a little longer.

— CNBC’s Lee Ying Shan, Hugh Leask and Lim Hui Jie contributed to this report.

What you need to know today

Major U.S. index were mixed Friday stateside. The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average inched up more than 0.1%, but the Nasdaq Composite closed 0.21% lower. The pan-European Stoxx 600 lost 0.55%. U.S. futures rose Sunday evening stateside.

China consumer prices pick up in October. The consumer price index, released Sunday, showed a 0.2% growth year on year. It beats analysts’ expectations of zero growth and is the first month since June that prices rose.

U.S. government on track to end shutdown. Enough Democratic senators had agreed to vote for a deal that would fund the U.S. government through the end of January, a person familiar with the deal told CNBC.

Another missed jobs report. The ongoing U.S. government shutdown — which is now the longest ever — means the Bureau of Labor Statistics couldn’t release its monthly employment data. Here’s what economists would have expected the report to show.

[PRO] Stocks that could bounce after sell-off. Using CNBC Pro’s stock screener tool, we found several names that are oversold, according to their 14-day relative strength index. This implies they could be due for a recovery in prices.

And finally…

Fluxfactory | E+ | Getty Images

A global wealth boom is fueling a rise in family office imposters

Fundraisers and fraudsters are presenting themselves as family office representatives, seeking to dupe gullible investors — and then there are also imposters who are in it just for an “ego boost,” several industry veterans told CNBC.

An information vacuum seems to have encouraged imposters. In many markets, genuine single family offices, or SFOs, are exempt from registering so long as they manage only family money. That privacy norm often makes verification hard, said industry experts.

Lee Ying Shan

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Week in review: The Nasdaq’s worst week since April, three trades, and earnings

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Week in review: The Nasdaq's worst week since April, three trades, and earnings

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Too early to bet against AI trade, State Street suggests 

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Too early to bet against AI trade, State Street suggests 

Momentum and private assets: The trends driving ETFs to record inflows

State Street is reiterating its bullish stance on the artificial intelligence trade despite the Nasdaq’s worst week since April.

Chief Business Officer Anna Paglia said momentum stocks still have legs because investors are reluctant to step away from the growth story that’s driven gains all year.

“How would you not want to participate in the growth of AI technology? Everybody has been waiting for the cycle to change from growth to value. I don’t think it’s happening just yet because of the momentum,” Paglia told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” earlier this week. “I don’t think the rebalancing trade is going to happen until we see a signal from the market indicating a slowdown in these big trends.”

Paglia, who has spent 25 years in the exchange-traded funds industry, sees a higher likelihood that the space will cool off early next year.

“There will be much more focus about the diversification,” she said.

Her firm manages several ETFs with exposure to the technology sector, including the SPDR NYSE Technology ETF, which has gained 38% so far this year as of Friday’s close.

The fund, however, pulled back more than 4% over the past week as investors took profits in AI-linked names. The fund’s second top holding as of Friday’s close is Palantir Technologies, according to State Street’s website. Its stock tumbled more than 11% this week after the company’s earnings report on Monday.

Despite the decline, Paglia reaffirmed her bullish tech view in a statement to CNBC later in the week.

Meanwhile, Todd Rosenbluth suggests a rotation is already starting to grip the market. He points to a renewed appetite for health-care stocks.

“The Health Care Select Sector SPDR Fund… which has been out of favor for much of the year, started a return to favor in October,” the firm’s head of research said in the same interview. “Health care tends to be a more defensive sector, so we’re watching to see if people continue to gravitate towards that as a way of diversifying away from some of those sectors like technology.”

The Health Care Select Sector SPDR Fund, which has been underperforming technology sector this year, is up 5% since Oct. 1. It was also the second-best performing S&P 500 group this week.

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