How it started
History
Lightspeed was founded by Dax da Silva in 2005, with its headquarters in Montreal, to provide point-of-sale and e-commerce software for retail businesses. In 2014, it expanded its customer base to include the hospitality industry. It has its offices in Montreal, New York, Ottawa, Toronto, London, Paris, Belfast, Amsterdam, Berlin, Geneva, Ghent and Melbourne. The company is backed by iNovia Capital and Accel Partners. Profit has ranked Lightspeed 24th in 2011 and 61st in 2012 on its list of "Canada's 200 fastest growing companies".
Accel Partners led a $30 million investment round in 2012 and from 2012 to 2013, the company observed a 120% growth in annual transactions. It acquired MerchantOS, a point-of-sale software developer in 2013. Lightspeed's customers processed $7.5 billion in 2013. At the time, the company served more than 15,000 store locations.
On June 18, 2014, the company added Advanced Analytics to Lightspeed Retail's feature roster. In September, Lightspeed closed a $35 million investment round led by iNovia Capital. The same year, it expanded its reach into the restaurant and hospitality industry in 2014 by the Belgian startup POSIOS. Lightspeed was serving 21,000 businesses and its per year transactions increased from $6 billion to $8.2 billion.
The next year, its client base increased to 23,000 businesses in more than 30 countries. In September 2015, 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. The next month 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 was rebranded as Lightspeed eCom and further refined to offer complete integration with the company's retail POS software.
In August 2016, Lightspeed suffered a data breach resulting in the exposure of sensitive data worth $12 billion.
From Wikipedia’s article on Lightspeed, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3