Commerce platform Lightspeed has announced plans to incorporate a payment platform into their service for merchants after closing $35 million in new funding.
Lightspeed Payments is due to be released this autumn in partnership with Element Payment Services, a Vantix company. Retailers will now be able to accept credit and debit cards or access critical information about financials without a third party. Lightspeed is also offering a merchant-friendly, transparent, flat-rate pricing model and support for Apple Pay.
The announcement follows a period of rapid growth for the commerce company for ‘serious’ retailers. This second round of funding, led by Canadian investment firm, iNovia Capital, and previous investor, Accel Partners, brings the total capital raised by Lightspeed to $65 million.
In the last six months Lightspeed has released several new products in quick succession. January saw the debut ofLightSpeed Web Store for Cloud, which provides quick, easy ecommerce setup for retailers; LightSpeed Cloud for iPad, a fully brandable point of sale system launched in May; and Advanced Reporting, which allows for in-depth analytics for cross-channel and multi-store analysis, became available in June.
Today, more than 20,000 retailers in more than 30 countries use LightSpeed to help run their stores, including Adidas, Harman, Leica, and DASH. LightSpeed now processes more than $7.5 billion in annual transactions.
“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.”
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