LightSpeed Closes $35 Million in Funding to Fuel Expansion

MONTREAL, Sept. 17, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- LightSpeed, the commerce platform for serious retailers, today announced that it closed $35 million in new funding led by Canadian investment firm, iNovia Capital, and previous investor, Accel Partners.

This is LightSpeed's second round of funding and comes at a time of rapid growth for the Company – bringing total capital raised to $65 million.

Today, more than 20,000 of the most discerning retailers in more than 30 countries trust LightSpeed to help run their stores, including Adidas, Harman, Leica, and DASH. LightSpeed now processes more than $7.5 billion in annual transactions.

"At LightSpeed, we're passionate about building the most innovative software products for retailers around the world and continuing to delight our customers," said Dax Dasilva, CEO of LightSpeed. "This investment will help us continue to scale our reach and break into new verticals and geographies."

This funding round will accelerate the path of innovation set by LightSpeed, fueled by a series of product innovations that make it easier for retailers to build, manage and grow their business. This includes the January debut of LightSpeed Web Store for Cloud, which provides quick, easy ecommerce setup for retailers; LightSpeed Cloud for iPad, a fully brandable point of sale system that launched in May; and Advanced Reporting, which became available in June and allows for in-depth analytics for cross-channel and multi-store analysis.

Payments Innovation with LightSpeed Payments
LightSpeed is also announcing LightSpeed Payments, a new payments platform coming this fall in partnership with Element Payment Services, a Vantiv company. With LightSpeed Payments, retailers will no longer need to deal with a third party to begin accepting credit and debit cards or access critical information about financials, greatly simplifying store management. Additionally, LightSpeed will offer a merchant-friendly, transparent, flat-rate pricing model and support for Apple Pay.

"Payments is the next step in our plan to make it possible for retailers to manage their entire business within LightSpeed," said Dasilva. "By combining the point-of-sale with payment processing, LightSpeed will be able to offer retailers an end-to-end experience superior to anything in the market. This partnership eliminates the time-consuming task of reconciling between two different systems and will surface information inside of LightSpeed that will allow retailers to make better informed decisions."

"LightSpeed is deeply ingrained in the challenges and needs of today's retailer. They've figured out how to make big-box retail tools easy and accessible to independent retailers to help them thrive in a highly competitive market," said Chris Arsenault, Managing Partner at iNovia Capital. "We are thrilled to be their partner in this journey."

About Accel Partners
Founded in 1983, Accel Partners has a long history of partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams to build world-class businesses. Accel today invests globally using dedicated teams and market-specific strategies for local geographies, with offices in Palo Alto, California, New York City, London and Bangalore.  Accel has helped entrepreneurs build over 300 successful companies, many of which have defined their categories, including Atlassian, Arista Networks, Braintree, Cloudera, Dropbox, Etsy, Facebook, Groupon, Kayak, Supercell, and Spotify. For more information, visit the Accel Partners web site at www.accel.com or find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/accel.

About iNovia Capital
iNovia Capital partners with exceptional entrepreneurs to build successful technology companies in high-growth sectors. The team is comprised of founders, builders and engineers  that are passionate about growing market-leading technology companies. Known for a people first approach to investing and portfolio management, iNovia has $275M under management  across three seed and early-stage funds. iNovia's investment focus lies in Digital Media,  SaaS and Communications. Investments include: AppDirect, Busbud, Basis Science, Chango, Collective, Lightspeed, Luxury Retreats and Top Hat. For more information, visit www.iNovia.vc or Tweet @iNovia.

About LightSpeed
LightSpeed provides serious retailers the simplest way to build, manage and grow their business and create a better shopping experience. More than 20,000 stores processing over $7.5 billion in transactions annually use LightSpeed's retail commerce platform to unify inventory, customer preferences, sales and analytics, in-store and online. Founded in 2005 with offices in Montreal, New York City, Olympia, Ottawa, and Santa Cruz. LightSpeed is backed by Accel Partners and iNovia Capital. Visit us at www.lightspeedretail.com.

Media contact:
Sarah Spitz
Bateman Group
[email protected]

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SOURCE LightSpeed