LightSpeed has raised $35 million to get into the mobile payments game

LightSpeed, a Canadian retail software startup, plans to introduce a payments system and boost its international presence with $35 million in funding from INovia Capital and Accel Partners Ltd. The investment brings Montreal-based LightSpeed’s total to $65 million. Accel led a $30 million round in 2012. LightSpeed builds software that retailers can use to combine in-store and online sales systems, track inventory and collect data on shoppers. Lightspeed’s customers, which include Fender Musical Instruments Corp. and Leica Camera AG, process an average of $500,000 each year in 20,000 stores, Chief Executive Officer Dax Dasilva said in an interview.

Mobile payments is arguably one of the hottest topics at the moment, and LightSpeed, a company that builds software for brick-and-mortal retailers, is joining the conversation. Today the company announced a $35 million round and plans to launch a new mobile payments service later this fall. “90 percent of retail still happens in the brick-and-mortar stores,” LightSpeed Dax Dasilva said in an interview with VentureBeat. Today, LightSpeed is used in 20,000 stores, and its customers now process $7.5 billion in sales per year. LightSpeed will be rolling out support for mobile payments later in this fall, in partnership with payments processing company Vantiv, offering an alternative to traditional credit card processing, Square, and the likes. “We don’t think there’s a lot of value to payments without that [retail] software…We want to get away from retailers looking at payments and inventory as different silos,” said Dasilva. Unlike mobile payments company Square, which got its start with helping small businesses process credit card payments and eventually expanded its offerings with analytics software, mobile ordering tools, and so on, LightSpeed is building in the opposite direction.