Lightspeed
“Can a vertical commerce platform (POS + eCommerce) own enough of the merchant's financial stack — payments, capital, and beyond — to justify premium SaaS pricing and reduce churn across retail, hospitality, and golf?”
Founded in 2005 as a POS software provider for independent retailers and restaurants, Lightspeed grew through acquisitions and geographic expansion into a unified commerce platform serving retail, hospitality, and golf verticals. The company's embedded finance pivot began in earnest around 2017–2022, when it moved from referring merchants to third-party processors to owning the payments layer via Adyen (B2B) and Stripe (US/Canada omnichannel). Lightspeed then layered in capital (merchant cash advances via Lightspeed Capital), creating a bundled SaaS+payments+fintech stack designed to deepen merchant lock-in and grow revenue per location.