Forget dongles: Leaf raises $20M to for customized point-of-sale tablets

Leaf has raised $20 million to advance development of its mobile point-of-sale (POS) solutions.

Leaf manufactures customized tablet POS systems for brick and mortar businesses. Its LeafPresenter tablet comes with a magnetic stripe card reader, near field communication (NFC), Europay MasterCard Visa (EMV), front and rear-facing cameras, and can also accept gift cards, PayPal, and mobile wallets.

The company also offers a suite of cloud-based analytics and management tools that helps SMBs make sense of their data.  Business owners can drill down into the data to learn about how specific products, categories, times of day, and employees affect business. LeafBusiness also integrates with third-party applications.

Leaf is currently working on a platform to encourage developers to create applications that can run on LeafPresenter and integrate with LeadBusiness.

Its target market is local businesses, such as fast food and full service restaurants, boutiques, salons, and exercise studios. Many of these businesses are transitioning away from traditional POS systems because they are expensive, difficult to maintain, and not connected to the Internet.

Square, perhaps the best known company in the space, pioneered this model with its dongle which plugs into smartphones to process credit cards, and its Square Register software which turns tablets into POS systems.

Unlike Square, Leaf creates its own tablets and claims that this better addresses “the needs and rigors of the business operating environment.” Its goal is to provide a single platform that merchants can use for all their business needs.

Heartland Payment Systems, a large payment processor and provider of merchant business solutions, led this first round of funding.

Leaf is based in Cambridge,  Massachusetts.