Lightspeed Commerce Inc.

telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press the star 1. Thank you. I'd now like to turn the call over to Gus Papagiorgio, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Lightspeed's Fiscal Q4 2024 Conference Call. Joining me today are Dax De Silva, Lightspeed's Founder and CEO, Ashraf Abshani, our CFO, and J.D. Samothand, our President. After prepared remarks from DACs and ASHA, we will open it up for your questions. We will make forward-looking statements on our call today that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Certain material factors and assumptions were applied in respect of conclusions, forecasts, and projections contained in these statements. We undertake no obligation to update these statements, except as required by law, You should carefully review these factors, assumptions, risks, and uncertainties in our earnings press release issued earlier today, our fourth quarter 2024 results presentation available on our website, as well as in our filings with U.S. and Canadian securities regulators. Also, our commentary today will include adjusted financial measures, which are non-IFRS measures and ratios. These should be considered as a supplement to and not a substitute for IFRS financial measures. Reconciliations between the two can be found in our earnings press release, which is available on our website, on CEDAR Plus, on the FCC's EDGAR system. And finally note that because we report in U.S. dollars, all amounts discussed today are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise indicated. With that, I will now turn the call over to Dax.

Thanks, Gus, and welcome, everyone. As you are well aware, I recently returned as Lightspeed's CEO. I'm excited and energized to be back in this role. and look forward to guiding Lightspeed through the next phase of its evolution, a phase that will be defined by profitable growth. So far, we are off to a great start. I'm happy to announce that this past quarter, we delivered revenue of $230.2 million, up 25% year over year, ahead of previously established outlook, and adjusted EBITDA of $4.4 million. For the full fiscal year, we grew revenues by 24% to $909.3 million, and delivered on our promise of break-even or better adjusted EBITDA. And I am very proud that payments penetration came in at 32% this past quarter, meeting our target of between 30% to 35% by the end of our fiscal year. Our unified payments initiative has been a resounding success, and I want to thank everyone at Lightspeed that was involved in this effort. It highlights how effective this organization can be when we set goals and work together towards achieving them. I founded Lightspeed with the aim of helping independent businesses bring life into our cities and neighborhoods by helping them create exceptional customer experiences, the kind that stand out from the crowd. Our role is to empower these players with technology that was once available only to large enterprises. And this quarter, we were honored to add a host of compelling new customers, including the five-star Hotel Les Roches Blanches in Cassis on the southern coast of France, which adopted Lightspeed Restaurant to operate their four beautiful restaurants and luxury villa. Johnston Canyon Lodge and Bungalows in Banff National Park, which has chosen Lightspeed to power their restaurant and cafe. NASA's Langley Research Center, which selected Lightspeed Retail to operate their retail outlet. With multiple locations across the United States, Five Star Nutrition, a supplements and protein retailer that has started to adopt Lightspeed Retail power many of their retail stores. Esther Restaurants and Bar in Sydney implemented light-feed restaurants to run their highly regarded restaurant. And for our supplier network, we were delighted to add dozens of new brands, including Aldo Group, St. Owen, and 7 Till Midnight. Adding new customers is important, but equally important is helping our existing customers grow. I find few things more satisfying than watching our customers leverage our platforms to thrive and prosper. Their stories are inspiring, and I want to share a few with you here today. Mildred's, a vegetarian food restaurant which opened its first location in 1988 in Soho, has expanded to six locations using light-feed restaurants and payments. Like many of our customers, Mildred's was using pen and paper to take orders and dated legacy terminals for payments. Light-feed restaurants moved them into the digital age and allowed staff to spend more time with their guests and less time placing and waiting for orders and taking payments. By eliminating the mundane administrative tasks that weighed down the staff and management team at Mildred's, they are now focused on opening their next location. Analog October Records has been a customer of ours since founder Craig Crane opened his doors in 2017. His vinyl record store, located in Chichester, UK, has seen great success with Lightspeed retail and Lightspeed payments. More recently, Craig used an advance from Lightspeed Capital to help take his love for music to the next level and finance his very own record label. Craig's story demonstrates how the expansion of financial services in the Lightspeed platform can help entrepreneurs prosper and grow into entirely new ventures. On the supplier network side, Tribal Sportswear, a Montreal-based apparel brand available at over 2,000 boutiques and online shops across North America, wanted to expand their business. However, It lacked the data needed to make informed business decisions, such as how to improve sales forecasting, streamline their sales efforts, and enable broader buyer outreach. By leveraging New Order by Lightspeed, Tribal Sportswear gained access to trend reports to identify cost savings, enhance customer segmentation efforts, and expand outreach, leading to a 23% year-over-year increase in orders. Helping real businesses make an impact in their communities is the reason that I founded Lightspeed, The value we bring to the table is to enable businesses like Mildred's, Analog October Records, and Tribal Sportswear with solutions that allow them to scale and optimize their operations. One of the areas where I've spent a lot of my time since returning as CEO is on our product strategy, which is an area where we will continue to invest. Overall, I have never felt better about where we stand from a product perspective. As an industry leader, it's crucial that we continue to leverage new technologies to further differentiate our products. Lightspeed has leveraged AI to automate mundane tasks that frees up time for our merchants to focus on their customers. We're constantly exploring new opportunities to leverage generative AI in our business and bring increased value to our merchants through smarter decisions and actionable insights. Through this initiative, we're committing to value-driven innovation for our merchants and focusing our teams on using Lightspeed AI to deliver against three core pillars, making recommendations to improve our merchant sales and profits, forecasting future needs, and reducing the burden of operational tasks to save our merchants time and money. So far, we've released several AI-driven innovations, including AI-generated product and menu descriptions and AI-powered configuration recommendations for Light Food Restaurant, but this is just the beginning. And of course, we will continue to innovate our platform outside of AI, During this past quarter, we continued to deliver great new features. In retail, we launched improved forecasting on Lightspeed retail. Our data shows that on average, the top 5% of any merchant's products are out of stock 21% of the time, leading to lost revenue and profits. Our new forecasting abilities will take into account out-of-stock periods so merchants can more accurately stock their inventory. We also released order tracking on Apple Wallet, allowing Lightspeed e-commerce consumers track their orders through their Apple Wallet, eliminating the need for emails or third-party sites. In hospitality, we launch major enhancements to order anywhere, including order history and account management for light-seed restaurant guests. This new capability facilitates quick reordering, which helps improve repeat business for our restaurant customers. Our success as a company is directly linked to how well our customers perform, so our product development focus is geared towards ensuring they succeed. Now I would like to take some time to discuss the year ahead. I think the accomplishments of this past year place us in an excellent position to pursue our overarching goal of long-term profitable growth. Our go-to-market teams are now focused on our flagship offerings, payments penetration continues its strong upwards trajectory, and we now have positive adjusted EBITDA operations. For fiscal 2025, we are focused on three key operational objectives aimed at achieving our goal of profitable growth. And these are accelerating software revenue growth and gaining market share, continuing to advance adoption of our financial services, and controlling costs and finding operational efficiencies. In terms of accelerating software revenue growth, we are pursuing this goal on two fronts. We're going to improve our go-to-market efforts and, as I already mentioned, continue to invest in product innovation. Having made significant strides with our unified payments efforts, our account managers will now start to return to their traditional role of upselling software, which we expect to gain momentum as we move through fiscal 2025. We also have several other initiatives underway to improve our go-to-market efforts. These include perfecting all aspects of our customer journey in terms of how we land, launch, manage, and support our customers. We want to focus our resources on our ideal customer profile to ensure they have a seamless experience with Lightspeed. Our efforts will remain focused on finding and catering to higher GDP customers that tend to adopt more software, generate more payments revenue, and have lower churns. Updating pricing across our portfolio of products. This will be a targeted effort, and we are looking at both existing and new customers across the organization by product and region. We want to ensure our pricing is representative of the immense value we provide to customers. Increasing our outbound sales motions. We find field reps are better at winning high GDP customers. We are repurposing some of our spend and expect to end fiscal 2025 with north of 100 outbound reps. And finally, we will complement these go-to-market initiatives by investing in growing brand awareness across our retail verticals and in regions where our hospitality offering is strong. As I've already discussed, on the product side, we will accelerate innovation by increasing our investment in R&D. This will include expanding on our established advantages, such as industry-leading inventory management capabilities and supplier network, as well as leveraging new technologies, such as AI, to differentiate our products. Our second objective is to continue to advance adoption of our financial services, including payments, capital, and instant deposit. 2024 was a transformative year for payments adoption. Payments is now so deeply embedded into our software products that we no longer distinguish the two as separate offerings. Unified payments improved our processes and technologies in terms of selling and onboarding payments customers, and we will continue to recognize these benefits during fiscal 2025 and beyond. I expect payments penetration to continue its upward trajectory for this year and next. We also had another good year for capital, which more than doubled revenue in the year. With the expansion of capital to EMEA and APAC, I expect to continue to see impressive growth from this offering. The data we maintained for our POS and payments offerings allows us to mitigate our risk exposure on capital advances while helping to ensure healthy returns. And, although we only launched instant deposit last year, it is showing excellent potential for growth. Given the high margin impact of these products, capital and instant deposit have the potential to meaningfully improve our profitability. Our third objective for fiscal 2025 is to control costs and find operational efficiencies. Last month, we took the difficult but necessary decision to eliminate 280 roles, reducing our headcount-related operating expenses by approximately 10%. In addition, we have taken other actions to reduce costs, such as moving our sales summit to a virtual format and reducing our office footprint. And we will continue to look for opportunities to reduce costs across the organization and continue to invest in sales and R&D while expanding margins. I will let Asha discuss this topic in more detail and will now turn the call over to her to take us through the quarterly results and provide our outlook.