Lightspeed Commerce open to acquisitions but not eyeing anything large-scale: CFO

Lightspeed Commerce Inc. is open to more acquisitions but isn’t looking to snag any giants.

Chief financial officer Asha Bakshani said Thursday that the Montreal-based maker of sales technology remains “opportunistic in evaluating small, tuck-in acquisitions to help accelerate product development.”

“However, large-scale acquisitions are not a strategic priority for us,” she told analysts on a call.

Bakshani’s remarks come as executives are deep into reshaping Lightspeed after the 2025 conclusion of a strategic review that put a sale of the business on the table.

Lightspeed, which was focused on selling checkout technology to a wide swath of clients, emerged from the process with a narrower focus on North American retail and European hospitality.

Weeks ago, it announced it would sell Upserve, a restaurant management cloud-software company that catered to U.S. hospitality clients, to Skyview Equity for up to US$81 million.

Divesting the company better positions Lightspeed for growth, expands its margins and has little impact on its financial performance, Bakshani said Thursday.

“This is structural improvement in the business, not short-term optimization,” she said.

Upserve was acquired in 2020, when Lightspeed was well into a spending spree that saw it scoop up at least 10 businesses between 2018 and 2021.

The businesses mostly sold rival point-of-sale technology that cornered parts of the market Lightspeed wanted to move into or have a better chance of dominating. Chronogolf, for example, had a sports focus while Upserve targeted restaurants.

But after buying e-commerce tech firms Ecwid and NuOrder in 2021, Lightspeed’s acquisition push slowed. It also carried out rounds of layoffs and eventually, founder Dax Dasilva returned with a mission to boost its lagging stock.

Dasilva said on the same call as Bakshani that Lightspeed’s fourth-quarter results released Thursday “show unequivocally the strategy is working.”

Lightspeed reported a loss of US$28.6 million in the quarter as its revenue rose 15 per cent compared with a year ago.

The company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, said the loss amounted to 20 cents US per share for the quarter ended March 31.

The result compared with a loss of US$575.9 million or US$3.79 per share in the same quarter last year when it took a non-cash goodwill impairment charge of US$556.4 million.

On an adjusted basis, Lightspeed earned eight cents US per share in its latest quarter compared with an adjusted profit of 10 cents US per share a year ago.

Revenue for the period totalled US$290.8 million, up from US$253.4 million in the same quarter last year.

Transaction-based revenue amounted to US$185.3 million, up from US$157.8 million, while subscription revenue totalled US$93.3 million, up from US$87.9 million. Hardware and other revenue rose to US$12.1 million compared with US$7.8 million a year ago.

The results pushed the company’s share price down by almost 10 per cent to $11.22 in mid-afternoon trading.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 21, 2026.

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