Bolt, the one-click checkout fintech started by Ryan Breslow, is partnering with Palantir Technologies, the data analytics firm co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, to offer a payments process enhanced by AI.
The companies plan to offer consumers a personalized checkout experience by leveraging Palantir's software and data analysis, which will present customers with their preferred payment method, as well as remember their shopping preferences and make suggestions for additional items to buy.
Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow said:
“We see a big opportunity right now at making payments more intelligent. Certain investor groups wanted to do different things, and they got their time to do those different things, and it didn’t work as well as they thought. Now I’m back and we’re implementing all of the original vision of Bolt.”
Quick Backstory: Breslow founded Bolt in 2014 from his Stanford dorm and grew it into a $11B fintech startup, however, he stepped down as CEO in 2022 amid investor tension and social media backlash over a series of tweets aimed at Y Combinator and Stripe, just before the company’s valuation and headcount collapsed. After a turbulent two years for the company marked by lawsuits and layoffs, Breslow returned as CEO in March 2025 with board support and a controversial $14B fundraising package, and is now leading a turnaround to restore Bolt’s relevance in the checkout space.
Through the new Palantir partnership, Bolt says it will use a trove of data it has collected about millions of shoppers to create specialized models that can offer shoppers a customized checkout experience that can be embedded within retailers' sites and apps. Bolt will also bring the models to its recently launched SuperApp, an all-in-one finance and crypto hub that delivers real-time shopper signals, with plans to bring deeper personalization and intelligence to every phase of the buying journey in the future.
Okay, but what, is Palantir?
Palantir is a U.S.-based software company that builds data integration and analysis platforms for government agencies, defense contractors, and large enterprises. It was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, with early backing from the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel. The company’s flagship products, Palantir Gotham and Palantir Foundry, are used for intelligence, military operations, and commercial data analysis. It went public in 2020 and is now expanding into private sector markets like e-commerce.
Palantir is facing mounting public scrutiny for its work with the Trump administration, and most recently, its increasingly defensive stance toward journalists and critics after an employee threatened to call the police on a WIRED journalist who was watching software demonstrations at its AI+ Expo booth, and later had conference security remove at least three other journalists.
Honestly, a Thiel-Breslow partnership may be a match made in heaven, however, it'll be up to merchants whether they want to align themselves with a defense contractor to power their product recommendations. Then again, with Microsoft, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and other AI goliaths all involved with the military, it might be inevitable no matter which AI company you choose.