Lightspeed Commerce narrowed its net loss and beat revenue expectations in its fiscal first quarter on Thursday, as the company bet that its AI product innovations would help create sustained profitability.
The Montréal-based tech firm posted revenue of $322 million USD ($453 million CAD) for the quarter, exceeding internal projections and growing six percent year over year, even counting its divestiture of US hospitality product line, Upserve, in late April. Excluding the impact of the divestiture, the company’s revenue grew by 17 percent compared to the same period last year.
Lightspeed still registered a net loss in the latest fiscal quarter of $2.4 million USD. However, that’s down significantly compared to last year, when it posted a net loss of $49.6 million USD.
Founded in 2005, Lightspeed sells point-of-sale and commerce software and hardware to restaurants, retailers, and hospitality providers. Since last year, the company has been executing a transformation plan to focus on two key markets—North American retail and European hospitality—while chasing both growth and profitability.
Though Lightspeed’s share price dipped in line with other software stocks by roughly 20 percent this year from a high of $17 CAD, it climbed in recent weeks and was down by roughly five percent since January on the Toronto Stock Exchange before markets opened, trading at $15.47 CAD. This comes as the company executed a share buyback plan worth roughly $86 million USD this quarter.
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Lightspeed’s revenue grew by 14 percent year-over-year this quarter, and it added 1,300 new customers. More broadly, its overall gross margin fell to 43 percent, compared to 45 percent in the same period, which the company attributed to negative hardware margins. The company acknowledged last quarter that it must improve those margins, given its strategy of offering discounts and incentives on its point-of-sale hardware to win new customers.
This quarter, the firm released a suite of AI integrations into its retail and hospitality management software. On the payments side, the company said it added features like saved payment methods, pre-authorization, automated payment reconciliation, and hardware upgrades. It also launched an integration with email manager Klaviyo, as well as multiple tools to generate blog and marketing content with generative AI.
Lightspeed ended the quarter with $372.1 million USD in cash and equivalents on its balance sheet. It maintained the same outlook for the rest of fiscal year 2027, where it expects to make over $1.2 billion USD in revenue.
Feature image courtesy Lightspeed.