Inbound Sales Development Representative

PoS vendor Lightspeed suffers data breach. Incident overview. Lightspeed, a prominent Canadian provider of point-of-sale (PoS) and e-commerce software, recently confirmed an unauthorized data breach affecting its systems. The incident involved external actors gaining unauthorized access to the company's internal environment, leading to the exposure of sensitive customer information. While full technical specifics regarding the exact entry point or vulnerability exploited remain under active investigation, the breach highlights a significant security failure within their infrastructure. Lightspeed has since moved to secure its systems and is cooperating with relevant authorities. The scope of the impacted customer base is currently being assessed as the company conducts a forensic review to determine the volume and nature of the compromised data, such as merchant details or transaction records. Strategic implications. This breach underscores the severe risks associated with third-party software providers in the retail and e-commerce supply chain. Because PoS systems serve as the central hub for payment processing and inventory management, any compromise of a vendor like Lightspeed has cascading effects across thousands of independent merchants. Strategically, this forces organizations to re-evaluate their reliance on single-provider ecosystems and emphasizes the necessity for rigorous vendor risk management and due diligence. The incident poses significant regulatory and compliance challenges, particularly regarding global data protection standards like GDPR or CCPA. Furthermore, such breaches undermine consumer trust in digital payment systems, potentially driving a long-term shift toward more decentralized security architectures to protect retail integrity and customer financial data. Critical insights. Security teams utilizing third-party PoS solutions must prioritize enhanced visibility into the integration points between their local environment and the vendor's cloud infrastructure. Immediate mitigation strategies include auditing API access logs, enforcing strict multifactor authentication (MFA) for all administrative accounts, and implementing network segmentation to isolate PoS terminals from the broader corporate network. Organizations should look for indicators of compromise such as anomalous outbound traffic from payment devices or unusual administrative logins during non-business hours. Future security posture should lean toward a Zero Trust model, treating all third-party connections as inherently untrusted. Best practices moving forward include continuous monitoring of vendor security posture, regular penetration testing of third-party integrations, and establishing a robust incident response plan that explicitly accounts for vendor-side security failures.

Lightspeed Commerce CEO: our study analyzed half a million AI shopping responses and revealed who gets to compete. The internet gave independent retailers a fighting chance. Is AI taking it away? For decades, the internet has promised to level the playing field for retailers. Independent businesses that once depended on customers walking through their doors gained the opportunity to reach shoppers anywhere, competing with national chains in ways that would have been unimaginable before. Now, the growing popularity of AI search with consumers threatens to reverse that progress. Who gets to compete? Early signs suggest that when it comes to AI search the playing field is far from even for retailers. New research from Vaer AI, in partnership with Lightspeed Commerce, analyzing 460,000 AI-generated shopping responses across ChatGPT and Google's AI products, found that bigger merchants have an edge from the very start. When ChatGPT included retailer names in its own web searches, 97% were large or mid-sized chains. Small and local retailers accounted for just 1-4%. What struck me most was that independent merchants weren't necessarily missing because AI couldn't find them. Large and small retailers each accounted for roughly 38% of the sources AI cited. But big chains received 52% of the top recommendations, versus just 20% for smaller businesses. Consider a shopper looking to buy office supplies in New York. Three of the six sources ChatGPT cited were small local retailers, but its first recommendation was Staples. The local options were there. They just didn't make it to the top. AI didn't overlook these businesses because it couldn't find them. It found them and recommended Staples anyway. Think about what that means for independent retailers. They've spent decades investing in their online presence, learning how to compete in search results and finding ways to reach customers without the marketing budgets of national chains. Now, they can do everything right and still lose out when AI decides which businesses to recommend. The closer a shopper gets to making a purchase, the wider the gap becomes. Smaller retailers' share of top recommendations fell from around 30% for general browsing to just 10% for specific branded products, while larger retailers' share rose from roughly 40% to 60%. The concern isn't simply that AI might steer shoppers toward bigger retailers. It's that AI could increasingly determine which businesses get the chance to compete at all. What consumers want. The irony is that this isn't necessarily what consumers want. Recent research from my company found that half of surveyed consumers would be more likely to shop locally if AI made nearby independent retailers easier to discover. When asked what AI should prioritize when making recommendations, 33% of consumers said small or local businesses, compared with just 13% who thought AI should prioritize large brands. This shows a clear disconnect between what consumers want and what AI is giving them. A shopper may truly want to support the independent bookstore or boutique down the street, but they can't choose a business they never knew existed. As AI moves closer to shopping on our behalf, this gap becomes harder to ignore. The more choices we hand over to AI, the more important it is to understand whose choices it's actually making and where it's out of alignment. What can we do before AI makes the choice for us? It may seem like the odds are already stacked against independent retailers, but invisibility isn't inevitable. Vaer AI's data shows that simply having consumers add the word "independent" to a shopping prompt more than doubled the share of small and local retailers AI recommended. It also changed where AI looked for information: the share of retailer sources coming from large national chains fell from around 44% to as low as 9%. One word. That's all it took to dramatically change which businesses AI recommended. For consumers, the lesson is simple: be specific about what you value when using AI. If you want to support independent businesses, say so in your prompt. The results suggest that the way we ask these tools to search can meaningfully influence the choices they put in front of us. But why should consumers have to know the right words to give independent retailers a fighting chance? We should also think about what the algorithm is prioritizing. If size, familiarity, or a larger digital footprint consistently push national chains to the top, we risk building a shopping experience where the biggest businesses become the default, regardless of what consumers want. AI has the potential to broaden discovery and expand our options, not narrow them. The goal should be to give consumers better choices and help them decide more easily, not quietly make those decisions on their behalf. The future of retail should include more choice, not less. As AI takes on a greater role in how we discover and buy, we need to make sure it opens doors for businesses rather than closing them. AI should help consumers find the most relevant options, not just reinforce the biggest, most visible retailers. That matters for consumers as much as it does for businesses. A healthy retail ecosystem depends on shoppers having real choice, and on businesses of every size having a real opportunity to earn their attention and dollars. As this technology evolves, we have an opportunity to be thoughtful about the kind of shopping ecosystem we want it to create. The future of retail should be one where AI makes it easier for great businesses to compete, not one where fewer businesses get the chance.

Unveilr AI raises pre-seed from AJVC at ₹16.7 cr valuation. Unveilr AI has raised pre-seed funding from AJVC at a ₹16.7 crore valuation. The amount was undisclosed, but AJVC's standard ₹1.5 crore for 9% divides to exactly that number. Unveilr AI, a Mumbai company that tries to get brands named inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude answers, has raised pre-seed funding from Aviral Bhatnagar's AJVC at a ₹16.7 crore valuation. The amount was not disclosed. It is, however, derivable. AJVC's standard pre-seed deal is ₹1.5 crore for 9%, and ₹1.5 crore at 9% implies a post-money valuation of ₹16.67 crore. That is the ₹16.7 crore figure, to the decimal. The pattern holds across the portfolio too: Multibagg AI, Mindcase and Slayd each raised exactly ₹1.5 crore from the same fund. So this is almost certainly a ₹1.5 crore cheque on house terms. That matters because it sets the altitude. AJVC closed its maiden fund at ₹200 crore and writes roughly the same cheque into every company, which makes it a volume business: 25 to 35 companies in, a target of around 90 over the fund's life, and a founder who ran enterprise software and AI investing at Venture Highway before setting up on his own. Being backed by AJVC is a signal about stage, not about a bespoke conviction bet. Answer engine optimisation exists because an AI answer behaves differently from a results page. Ten blue links give a brand a chance at position seven; an AI answer names two or three companies and stops. Everyone else is invisible, not merely further down. That is a genuine structural change in how buyers shortlist, and it has produced a real market in under two years. It is also a market with a very expensive top end. Profound raised a $96 million Series C led by Lightspeed, with Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins participating, at a $1 billion valuation, making it the category's first unicorn. Peec AI, founded in Berlin in early 2025, has raised about $30 million across seed and Series A. AthenaHQ has raised $2.7 million. Meanwhile Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz have all built or bought AI visibility features, and Adobe, Salesforce and HubSpot are folding the capability into their platforms. Unveilr enters that at a valuation of roughly $1.9 million. Read quickly, that gap looks fatal. Read properly, it is a different business. Profound and Peec sell software: a dashboard, a subscription, no humans in the loop. Unveilr pairs its own agents with SEO and AEO specialists who then write the content and do the technical work, and it measures itself on leads delivered rather than on visibility scores. That is an agency with proprietary tooling, and agencies are priced on people rather than on revenue multiples. A ₹16.7 crore valuation for an eight-month-old services business is unremarkable, where the same number attached to a SaaS platform trying to catch Profound would be nonsense. The two companies are not really competing for the same thing, which is the point most coverage of this category keeps missing. The open question is which one it intends to become. Services revenue is real revenue and it arrives early, but it scales with headcount and it does not compound the way a software subscription does. The founder's own stated thesis is about compounding. What the company says it has done. Unveilr reports that for an Indian B2B legal services platform it lifted AI-sourced traffic about 4.7 times and leads five times, with roughly 80% more ChatGPT citations, and that for one direct-to-consumer brand organic search now drives about 27% of total revenue. Neither customer is named and neither figure is independently verifiable, which is the normal state of agency case studies rather than a mark against these ones. The company says customers typically see movement inside the first month. "A buyer today asks ChatGPT which lawyer, clinic or software to choose and gets two or three names back. If a brand isn't one of them, it has lost that lead before its website ever loads," said Sanditya Srivastava, founder and chief executive. "Referrals and paid campaigns bring in customers, but they don't compound. Organic visibility does." Aviral Bhatnagar framed the investment around usage inside his own portfolio. "Unveilr's strong adoption in our large AJVC portfolio is a sign of its general-purpose utility," he said. There is something concrete behind that: Multibagg, an AJVC company that raised its own ₹1.5 crore from the fund, sits among the customer logos on Unveilr's site alongside LexComply, Advarisk and Caredale. It is also a bounded signal, because a fund's portfolio companies are a friendly first market and adoption there is easier to win than adoption outside it. Where it goes next. The money funds engineering capacity to widen what the agents do, and a bigger sales team covering India, the UAE and the United States. The company launched in February 2026, which makes it roughly eight months old, and says its team combines IIT alumni with SEO and AEO specialists. It has been named company of the year in AI search by siliconindia and listed in Inc42's startups to watch. For anyone tracking this space, the useful comparison is not Unveilr against Profound. It is whether the Indian, UAE and US mid-market will pay for execution rather than dashboards, in a category where the tooling is commoditising fast and the incumbents are bundling it in free. The services layer is the part software cannot copy quickly. It is also the part that gets squeezed when visibility tracking becomes a checkbox inside a platform a brand already pays for. Plenty of Indian operators are already selling this service without a fund behind them, which tells you the demand is real and the barrier to entry is not. What ₹1.5 crore buys is a head start on turning that service into a product, and roughly eighteen months to prove it, which is what this year's funding data suggests a pre-seed now has to show before anyone writes the next cheque.