Lightspeed POS funding
As Square gears up for a public listing that may come as soon as next month, another startup that makes point-of-sale systems for restaurants and other retailers has raised a big round of funding.
Lightspeed POS, a startup based out of Canada that provides apps and other services for managing and selling inventory across both online and offline shopfronts, has picked up $61 million, money that its CEO and founder Dax Dasilva told TechCrunch it will use to expand internationally and make further acquisitions to grow its omnichannel sales model.
The Series C round was co-led by two large Canadian entities, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and Investissement Québec (IQ), with participation also from existing investors Accel and iNovia. It brings the total raised by Lightspeed to exactly a year ago.
The current valuation of the company is not being disclosed but after one of its competitors (and compatriots) Shopify went public earlier this year, reports suggested that Lightspeed is still short of the $1 billion mark.
But that is not to say that Lightspeed itself is small. The company currently processes around $10 billion a year in transactions from 25, 000 customers across 100 countries, seeing growth of 123% over last year.
To put those numbers in context, Shopify claims $10 billion in sales in aggregate across 175, 000 customers, and Square processed about $30 billion in transactions in 2014. Dasilva said that the smaller number of customers at Lightspeed speaks to the company’s focus on mid-market customers, who average around $600, 000/year in revenues on its platform, typically across 1-10 physical locations but sometimes up to 50.
The company is not revealing its revenues but Dasilva says it is still in “growth mode” — that is, unprofitable and reinvesting whatever might come as a profit back into the business. Unlike some POS services, like Square’s and iZettle’s that make a large chunk of revenues from a percentage of all transactions, Lightspeed takes a different approach.
Pricing for Lightspeed’s SaaS model begins at $76/month for a single store, with the ability to add on users/ upgrade for more stores. In addition to that monthly subscription cost, retailers can add on paid extras such as the Lightspeed Webstore as well as hardware bundles, also priced separately.
