Lightspeed purchases Swiss startup
Lightspeed POS Inc. has bought a Swiss company called ikentoo as part of a European expansion.
The purchase price of the deal wasn’t disclosed, but the Montreal-based company said that it would provide more detail about the acquisition, including the price paid, when Lightspeed reports its quarterly earnings on Aug. 8.
Lightspeed makes cloudbased point-of-sale software for small and medium-sized retailers and restaurants, and their software is currently used at more than 49,000 locations around the world. About onethird of their customers are in Europe.
ikentoo is currently available in 14 countries, but is heavily focused on France, Switzerland and South Africa. Like Lightspeed, ikentoo makes point-of-sale software, which runs on ipads for restaurants and bars.
Lightspeed already has an ipad app, but what they don’t have is customers in France and Switzerland.
In an interview, Lightspeed CEO Dax Dasilva said that point-of-sale systems are often very specifically tailored to individual countries, based on local regulatory requirements.
“Europe is one world, but as we all know, it’s a collection of individual countries with individual localization needs, and they’ve kind of already done that in these markets and grown really, really well,” Dasilva said. “As we look to build a global leader ... they were just a really, really nice fit to round out our presence in Europe. You know, we’re strong in Netherlands and Belgium and the U.K. and they bring us France and Switzerland and getting into South Africa.”
Lightspeed’s aim is to become the dominant brand for cloud-based point-of-sale software that can also handle things like e-commerce functions and loyalty programs to track customers.