Rebooted Cantaloupe Inc. ushers in new hi-tech era for vending and unattended retail
It’s official. Cantaloupe Inc. begins a new era for the payment and unattended retail software developer formerly known as USA Technologies.
Cantaloupe stock began trading on the Nasdaq under its new symbol “CTLP” on April 19, closing at $12.36. Click here to see story.
USAT purchased Cantaloupe for $85 million in November 2017. Cantaloupe’s could-based Seed platform was well established in the convenience services route sector. It was popular among operators who used it for route scheduling, merchandising and inventory management, and fleet monitoring, along with cashless payments.
Founded in 1992, USAT’s primary product was ePort, a cashless payment terminal for vending machines, kiosks and other unattended POS devices.
USAT was a pioneer in digital payments. Cantaloupe brought telemetry to the industry, driving change from a reactive “best-guess” operating model to a proactive just-in-time delivery paradigm.
“When we put the two companies together, everyone realized it was two leaders coming together,” said Cantaloupe chief executive Sean Feeney, who took the helm at USAT one year ago.
“But any time you change a brand there’s always a question of what drove that,” Feeney noted. “We want to expand internationally, and the USA Technologies brand really doesn’t work well when you go outside the United States.”
Cantaloupe chief technology officer Ravi Venkatesan explained that USAT’s early leadership in the cashless payment acceptance space is the solid foundation of the company, while Cantaloupe represents what the company is today building on that foundation.
“There are companies that have good R&D capabilities and ideas, but when you need to take those from a pilot stage to something that operates at scale there’s a struggle,” Venkatesan observed. “The nice thing about Cantaloupe is that we have the largest scale and footprint of points of sale…perhaps on the planet.”
Cantaloupe begins its new chapter with a base of some 18,000 customers and more than 1 million endpoints in the field, giving it tremendous scale.
“Execution, innovation and focusing on customers is what makes a brand great,” Feeney said. “We want to help the consumer buy it and go – that’s what we’re focused on.”