Lightspeed (company)

History

Dax Dasilva founded Lightspeed in 2005 to help businesses re-create an online shopping experience that offered convenience, personalization and product information. DaSilva is a programmer and previously interned with an Apple developer. From 2006 to 2011, the company had a 1900 percent growth and was named one of the fastest growing companies in Canada. In 2012, Profit ranked Lightspeed number 61 on its list of "Canada's 200 fastest growing companies." Accel Partners led a $30 million investment round in 2012.

In August of that same year, the company was named winner of the 5th Annual Innovative Award - Software Applications for their product, Lightspeed for iPad, which was designed to offer the ease-of-access, value and speed typical of the online shopping experience to brick-and-mortar retail businesses. Considered the first interactive POS platform of its kind, Lightspeed for iPad armed retailers with powerful sales and inventory management tools and helped to speed up the customer checkout process.

Lightspeed opened its first US office in New York City in March 2013. The 3,000 square foot space, which houses its US sales team and demonstration showroom would come to serve as a training center for retailers. Known for hosting numerous retail innovation seminars, these events were organized to encourage business owners to meet and exchange ideas, insights and best practices with the goal of improving the in-store shopping experiences they offered.

In July 2013, the company launched Lightspeed Retail, an HTML5 web-based product that can be used from any computer. The product was created by MerchantOS, a Lightspeed acquired point-of-sale software developer. Lightspeed's customers processed $7.5 billion in 2013.

On June 18, 2014, Lightspeed announced the addition of Advanced Analytics to Lightspeed Retail’s feature roster. Generating over 40 reports that provide real-time sales, employee, payment, vendor, inventory and customer data; the insights retailers could gain would help them easily spot trends and make better business decisions. The type of data analysis the feature yields is comparable to that of wide-scale ERP or business intelligence solutions, but is far more affordable and easier to understand.

In September 2014, Lightspeed closed a $35 million investment round led by iNovia Capital That month, Lightspeed partnered with Vantiv, a payment processing and technology solutions provider, to develop a payment platform that lets users make transactions within Lightspeed's software. The following month, Lightspeed acquired POSIOS, a Belgium-based mobile hospitality point-of-sale company, to expand into the restaurant industry. By October 2014, Lightspeed served 21,000 businesses and processed $8.2 billion in annual run-rate transactions.

As of April 2015, Lightspeed was being installed in 1,000 new stores every month, its software was being used by 23,000 businesses in more than 30 countries and its transaction volume had increased 120 percent from the previous year. In September of that year, Lightspeed closed a $61 million Series C round of funding led by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and Investissement Québec, with participation from earlier investors Accel Partners and iNovia.

In November 2015, Lightspeed acquired Amsterdam-based eCommerce software developer SEOShop, and announced that it would be expanding its product offering to serve both brick-and-mortar and online retailers. SEOShop’s eCommerce platform would be rebranded as Lightspeed eCom and further refined to offer a more complete integration with the company’s retail POS software.

Operations

Lightspeed has 480 employees in Montreal, Ottawa, Ghent, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, and New York The company has customers in thirty countries, but primarily in the United States, Canada, Australia and England. In October 2014, Lightspeed served 21,000 businesses and processed $8.2 billion in annual run-rate transactions.