Education, government and business
Bolt is sold to people today, one laptop at a time. What follows is where we are taking it for schools, agencies and companies, and none of it is buyable yet.
The short version: from 2028 an organization will be able to buy Bolt seats without buying Bolt laptops, and the people who hold a seat will sign into it on hardware they already own.
Coming 2028
An organization can buy Bolt seats without buying a single laptop. A seat is an account with cloud computing attached, and the people who hold one sign into it on a Bolt they already own.
The usual cost of putting a hundred people to work is a hundred machines, plus the imaging, the shipping, the asset tags and the ones that go missing. A seat has none of that. You are buying the computing and the account, and the hardware is already in the room.
Work happens in the work session, in the data center. There is no management software to put on somebody's personal property, no agent watching their machine, and nothing left behind on it when they sign out.
A seat has no machine registered to it, so there is no device for the account to trust and no shortcut to take. Signing into a work seat needs the person's Bolt Key every time, and there is no setting that turns that off.
Personal and work are already separate accounts. On top of that, an organization can stop a work seat moving files to or from other places on the web, so what is in the seat stays in the seat.
Turn off the seat and the access is gone that afternoon. No chasing a laptop through the post, no wiping a device somebody paid for themselves, and no wondering what is still on it.
A seat can be set more restrictive than the Bolt it runs on, so a school or an employer can filter their own sessions harder. It can never be set looser than the device, which is physical and cannot be argued with.
A class of students who own Bolts can be given school seats for the term and have them expire at the end of it. The laptop stays theirs, the school work stays the school's.
Where a government or a school has to keep records, keep data in a particular country, or prove who did what, the answers live in the data center rather than on machines spread around a building.
A seat is added to a person, not to a machine. Somebody with a work seat still owns their Bolt outright, keeps their own account on it, and takes both with them if they change jobs.
A Bolt runs one account at a time. To use a work seat you sign out of your own account and sign into the work one, and to go back you sign out again. There is no way to have both open at once, and that is deliberate rather than a limitation we have not got around to yet.
It means work files and personal files are never in the same session, so there is nothing to leak from one into the other and nothing for an employer to see on the personal side. Closing the lid signs you out, so the switch happens on its own at the end of the day.
Signing out of a personal account to sign into a work one already keeps the two apart: work files never sit in a personal session, and an employer never sees the personal side. That separation is built in and is not something anybody has to configure.
This is about the other direction. Inside the work session there is still a browser, and a browser can reach a personal mail account, a personal cloud drive or any site that takes an upload. So an organization can switch off transfers between a seat's Bolt Cloud Storage and anywhere else: downloads out, uploads in, or both.
With downloads off, a file in the work seat can be opened and worked on but not sent anywhere the organization has not allowed. With uploads off, nothing arrives from outside either, so unlicensed software and another employer's confidential documents never enter the seat. On an ordinary laptop this is close to unenforceable, because the USB port alone defeats it. A Bolt has no ports, so the browser is the only route left to close.
A personal Bolt can be registered to its owner, so signing into your own account on your own machine is a screen name and a password. A seat has no machine of its own. It runs on whatever Bolt the person happens to own, which is never registered to the organization, so there is nothing for the account to trust.
So a work or school seat asks for the Bolt Key every time, without exception and with no setting to turn it off. Two factors always, because the shortcut that makes a personal account convenient does not exist here and we would rather that be a rule than an option somebody can weaken. One key covers all of it. A key is not tied to a single account, so a person's own account and every seat they hold live on the same plug. Nobody carries a second one for work.
A seat can carry its own FamilySafe setting, and it can only ever be more restrictive than the laptop it runs on. A school can hand a K seat to a student whose own Bolt is rated A, and an employer can filter a work seat harder than the person filters their own machine. What nothing can do is go the other way.
A K Bolt is K in the hardware, so no seat, no employer and no setting can open it up. That matters most for the family that chose K in the first place: handing a teenager a work or school account can never be the thing that unlocks their laptop. The seat's setting applies while the seat is signed in, and the moment they sign back into their own account the device level is what governs.
If you are deciding what your school, agency or company buys in the next couple of years, leave an address and we will write when there is something to announce. Not a newsletter, and not often.
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None of this is available today, and Bolt itself does not ship until soon. Seats are planned for 2028. We are describing where this is going so that an organization deciding what to buy when it is ready knows what is coming, not taking orders for it.
Setting one up
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Questions
Answered for the version we are planning, not one that exists.
Yes, and every time they sign in. A seat has no machine registered to it, so there is no device for the account to trust and nothing to skip. Two factors always.
It is not a setting, so nobody can weaken it for convenience and no administrator has to enforce it.
No. A key holds as many accounts as a person has, so their own account and any seats they hold sit on the same plug. They carry one thing.
Yes, in one direction. A seat can be more restrictive than the Bolt it runs on, never less.
So a school can give a K seat to a student whose own laptop is rated A, and it applies while the school seat is signed in. A K laptop stays K no matter what seat is on it, because that one is decided in the hardware when the machine is built.
No. It applies to the seat, not to the laptop. When they sign out of the work seat and back into their own account, their own device level is what governs again.
Two different things are going on here, and it is worth separating them.
Work and personal are already separate accounts. A Bolt runs one at a time, so a work file is never sitting in somebody's personal session to begin with. Nobody has to switch that on.
What you can switch on is a restriction inside the work seat. The seat still has a browser, and a browser reaches personal mail and personal cloud drives, so transfers between the seat's Bolt Cloud Storage and anywhere else can be turned off: downloads out, uploads in, or both.
What it cannot stop is a photograph of the screen or somebody writing it down. Nothing can. It closes the easy routes, which is where nearly all of it actually happens.
If you turn off uploads, yes. Nothing reaches the work seat from outside it, so unlicensed software, another employer's confidential documents and infected files never enter the session.
This is separate from the personal account question. Files were never crossing between the two accounts anyway; this is about what the work seat itself can pull in from the web.
No. A Bolt runs one account at a time. You sign out of one and into the other, which takes a few seconds because there is nothing to load.
We could have built it the other way. We would rather the separation be something you can see than something you have to trust.
No. They pay for the seat, not for your laptop. The work session is theirs and the personal session is yours, and neither can reach into the other.
Then the organization buys them one, the same way it would buy any laptop. Seats are for the people who already have their own; they are not a way to avoid equipping somebody who needs equipping.
Yes, and most organizations will do both. Seats are useful where people already own a Bolt and would rather carry one machine than two.
We are not saying yet. Bolt is still being built, and seats come after there are Bolts in the world for them to run on.
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Coming soon
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