Canada’s Lightspeed POS Inc Raises $179M In IPO

In the largest initial public offering (IPO) by a tech firm in Canada in nearly nine years, shares of Lightspeed POS Inc. rocketed in the company’s debut of trading. The company raised $179 million and its stock jumped from an IPO price of C$16 by as high as 26 percent, Bloomberg reported.

Lightspeed’s shares finished up trading at C$19, up 19 percent. As a result, the Canadian company has a valuation of roughly C$1.7 billion. National Bank Financial, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of Montreal headed up the share of sales.

The company, which had early investors such as Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec, has over 700 people in its employ and was started in 2005. Overall, the firm has a small and medium-sized business focus and its platform can be utilized for different functions including inventory management and point of sale (POS). And, as it stands, the share sale is the largest since Smart Technologies Inc.’s 2010 U.S. listing.

Smart notched $660 million in that listing, while Shopify Inc. took $131 million in through its IPO. Shopify, which is based in Ottawa, now has a value surpassing $20 billion. Real estate software and data company Real Matters Inc., however, “has seen its market share shrink by about two thirds since its 2017 debut,” according to the outlet.

The news comes after Lightspeed launched its Lightspeed Payments offering for retailers based in the United State that integrates payment processing with a POS for merchants operating physical and online shops. The company’s Lightspeed platform, as it stood, already served small to medium-sized retailers.

Lightspeed Founder and CEO Dax Dasilva said of the launch in a January announcement, “Retailers are not only looking to make payment processing as seamless as possible to expedite checkout and optimize sales, but they want a solution that minimizes the time and effort required to manage operations so they can spend more time focusing on their customers.”