Lightspeed Raises Outlook on European Hospitality and Outbound Sales Tripling

The Lightspeed Q2 release dropped at 7 a.m. Eastern and I watched a Boston operator I’d been texting refresh his terminal three times before the numbers loaded. He runs four bistros on Lightspeed Restaurant, and his question to me was the same one half the inbox was asking: did the refocus actually work, or are we still in the “trust me” stage Dasilva inherited?

The print says it worked. Revenue came in at $319.0M, up 15% year-over-year, gross margin held at 42%, gross profit grew 18%, and adjusted free cash flow swung from $1.6M a year ago to $18.0M this quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was $22.2M. Lightspeed raised FY26 guidance the same morning. That last part is the sentence the market was waiting for.

The contrarian take I want to put on the record: this isn’t a beat-and-raise quarter you should read as cyclical strength. It’s structural. The Europe-hospitality plus North-America-retail refocus Dasilva announced last year is starting to show up in the segment lines, and the outbound sales build is the boring infrastructure story that will compound through FY27.

The mix is doing the work

Software revenue printed $93.5M, up 9%; transaction-based revenue printed $215.8M, up 17%. The transaction line growing nearly twice as fast as software is the tell — Lightspeed Payments attach is finally moving the needle on customers who’d been holding out, and Europe-hospitality merchants, where check sizes are higher and tipping behavior is more predictable, are the cohort doing it.

About 2,000 net Customer Locations were added in the quarter. That’s not a screaming-growth number in absolute terms, but it’s a different shape of number than the 2023 prints, when net adds were positive only because of acquisitions. These are organic. Mark interpretation: Dasilva’s “AI-driven innovation” framing in the release is, for once, not vapor — what’s actually shipping is a service-pacing assistant, a Benchmarks product the rest of the industry is going to have to answer, and a conversational layer that lets owners pull P&L cuts without bothering a bookkeeper. None of that is sci-fi. All of it raises the per-location ARPU ceiling, which is what a payments-attach story actually needs underneath it.

The Europe-hospitality concentration matters for a reason that doesn’t get said often enough: European restaurant operators churn slower than American ones. A French bistro on Lightspeed is a five-year customer in a way a U.S. casual-dining concept rarely is. If you’re modeling LTV/CAC, the geographic refocus is a quiet margin expansion story before it’s anything else.

Outbound tripled. That’s the FY27 setup.

Dasilva flagged on the call that outbound bookings tripled year-over-year and that the rep count — roughly 130 today — is growing to 150 by fiscal year-end. The Nasdaq write-up captures the framing but understates what it means. Twenty additional outbound reps doesn’t sound like much until you remember that Lightspeed historically grew through inbound and channel — the company simply did not have a hunting motion at scale. Building one is the hardest thing a SaaS company can do in year ten, and the fact that it’s working enough to triple bookings tells you the product is now defensible enough to win competitive deals on outbound.

The honest caveat: outbound bookings tripling off a small base is mathematically less impressive than the headline reads, and the conversion-to-revenue lag means we won’t see this in the P&L until the back half of FY26. But that’s the point. The structural story for FY27 is being put in place right now, in a quarter where the cyclical story is already strong enough to raise guidance.

I’ll have more to say about Lightspeed’s slim-but-real AI roadmap and the Skyview hospitality divestiture in a forthcoming May piece — the desk-review version, not the earnings-reaction version. For today, the read is simpler. Dasilva said he was going to refocus the company on two geographies and two verticals, build an outbound motion, and ship AI features that actually move ARPU. Q2 FY26 is the first quarter where you can point to all three on the same page.

The Boston operator texted back: “Okay, I’m staying.” That’s the trade.

— Maya covers restaurant tech for TableTransfers. Tips: [email protected].