Lightspeed POS, a Canadian retail software startup, has raised $61 million through its recent fundraising campaign. The company provides applications, as well as other services for managing and selling inventory. Lightspeed is based in Montreal with founder Dax Dasilva at the reins as CEO.
In Series A funding the company raised $30 million, which was followed by a second round of funding that brought in $35 million one year ago. A few weeks ago Lightspeed’s Series C funding round netted the company an additional $61 million, for a grand total of $126 million.
Although the company’s current valuation has not been disclosed, several reports after Shopify went public suggest that Lightspeed may be nearing the $1 billion mark. The company is currently processing about $10 billion a year in transactions, which come from 25,000 customers across 100 countries. The company has grown 123 percent over the last year.
The latest round of funding was led by pension fund manager Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec and Investissement Quebec. Additional support was provided by venture capital firms Accel Partners and iNovia Capital (News - Alert).
Founder Dax Dasilva said, “As a Canadian company based in Montreal, local support is paramount. We’re thrilled to welcome Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec and Investissement Quebec to the Lightspeed family.”
According to Dasilva, Lightspeed will use the money to build its sales force, as well as to get more stores and restaurants to use its point-of-sale software. They face stiff competition from systems built by bigger companies, especially Oracle (News - Alert) Corp. and NCR Corp. As of now, Lightspeed is more focused on brick and mortar retail stores than online sales.
Lightspeed began as a large payments provider for Apple (News - Alert) dealerships before Apple really took off with its own retail operation. This was used as a learning experience for the company. In October 2014, Lightspeed acquired a restaurant focused POS service called Posios, which paved a way to expand into other verticals.
Dasilva does suggest that Lightspeed may move into doing more online business in the future. He noted, “We have an e-commerce module but we’re not doing e-commerce first. We have made three acquisitions already and we are always looking at new opportunities. We see POS as the basis of an operating system for a store, with lots of related services coming off of it. Sometimes our customers want to buy from a single vendor so we may make acquisitions to address that, to seamlessly integrate components so that they are part of a single solution.”
Edited by Kyle Piscioniere