Two top leaders have left Bolt Financial after the checkout company moved to significantly cut its workforce this year and rely more on artificial intelligence.

Justin Grooms, the company’s former president and one-time CEO, as well as Bert Smith, its former chief information security officer, have both exited the San Francisco-based company. Those departures follow the company cutting about a third of its employees earlier this year.

“After nearly seven years, I have moved on from Bolt,” Grooms said in a statement to Payments Dive Tuesday. “It was a privilege to help build something meaningful in payments, and I have enormous respect and gratitude for the people I worked with.”

Similarly, Smith posted a farewell to Bolt on LinkedIn two weeks ago. “After four and a half years at Bolt, my time here is wrapping up,” he said. “I'm really excited about what's to come next. More on that soon. Until then I will finish out the month as I always have, protecting what matters.”

The leadership changes come as CEO Ryan Breslow, who is also Bolt’s founder, charges ahead with an artificial intelligence strategy aimed at running the company “as a much leaner organization,” he said in April. That was when the company also announced job cuts.

"Justin and Bert have been incredibly valuable players at Bolt," a spokesperson for the company said, expressing thanks for all they contributed and noting they remain "friends" to Bolt. "After years with the company, they each decided to move on to different opportunities.”

Breslow grabbed headlines last month when he declared his company had no need of a human resources department standing in the way of Bolt’s business. He said “problems disappeared” when he got rid of Bolt’s HR team, according to the news outlet Fortune.

In 2022, Breslow, who had run Bolt since 2013, left his CEO role and became executive chairman, after a public rant against the larger fintech competitor Stripe played out on the social media platform Twitter, now known as X. He returned to the post in March 2025, taking back the CEO title from Grooms, who had served in the role on an interim basis. 

Bolt sought to raise $600 million last year to help finance the company, according to a report from the media company Bloomberg, but it’s not clear if the company ever closed on that fundraising. Bolt didn’t complete a fundraising effort in 2024, according to news outlet Axios.

In the only press release posted on its website this year, Bolt touted a new partnership in January to offer payments services for gaming in Japan. The company said it was partnering with Playfinity to provide global payments, checkout options and identity verification.