# Bolt: Vertical CPO, Bolt Delivery

> Took a three-sided food and grocery marketplace to full profitability at €1.5B+ GMV.

- **Period:** 2022 to 2025
- **Company:** Bolt Technology OÜ (Europe’s leading mobility super-app)
- **Location:** Germany · Estonia
- **Scope:** 50,000+ merchant partners, 10M+ consumers and a courier fleet across 16 countries. A ~150-person product, design, data and engineering group. Product and Growth reported in directly; Design and Data took business direction from me.
- **Themes:** Three-sided marketplaces, Unit economics, AI in production, Logistics & dispatch, Growth & incentives

## Outcomes

- €1.5B+: GMV run-rate at full profitability
- +600 bps: contribution margin expansion
- −30%: unit operational cost with production ML
- −25%: late orders

Led product for the Food & Grocery vertical across 16 countries and owned the product and technology investment case within the vertical P&L.

## The situation

Food and grocery delivery is a business that clears three to five percent margin on a good day. Bolt Delivery had scale across 16 countries. The mandate was to turn that scale into a business that pays for itself, without losing growth.

## What I did

- **Ran every investment against one filter:** the shortest path to profitability. Established ROI-based portfolio governance that held R&D to a 3x+ return bar.
- **Shipped AI directly to merchants:** a generative menu builder and optimizer, a key-account agent that read each merchant’s performance and returned specific actions to grow sales, and automated resolution of refund and delivery complaints.
- **Put production ML across the logistics stack:** dispatch and route optimization, multi-level demand forecasting matching courier supply to order demand, and entrance-door detection.
- **Re-engineered growth:** moved spend from blanket subsidies to precision-targeted incentives, built growth loops, and upgraded CRM and lifecycle capabilities for profitable frequency and retention.

## What changed

The vertical reached fully loaded profitability at a €1.5B+ GMV run-rate, contribution margin expanded by 600 basis points, unit operational costs fell 30% and late orders fell 25%.

## What I took from it

In thin-margin marketplaces, AI earns its keep in the unglamorous places: dispatch, forecasting, support. The demo-friendly features matter less than the ones that move cost-to-serve.

Source: https://zoltan.peaktopeak.hu/work/bolt