Skai Solutions connects to Kounta and Lightspeed, so a phone order taken by the agent arrives as a ticket in Kounta the same way a counter order does, with no re-keying, no second screen, no new hardware and 5 days of setup. You keep your existing number and your existing POS exactly as they are.
Kounta was built in Sydney and is now part of Lightspeed. It runs in a very large share of Australian cafes and small-to-mid venues - if you signed up to Kounta years ago and it quietly became Lightspeed around you, this is your page.
Because Kounta is cloud-native, phone orders appear on your existing screens and printers the same way an online order does. No second terminal, no separate tablet on the pass.
A$299 a month for 500 minutes, or A$599 for 1,500, plus a one-off A$499 setup that covers the Kounta connection and your menu build. In New Zealand that is NZ$325, NZ$649 and NZ$545. Month to month, no lock-in, 30 days' notice. Full pricing.
Before you buy anything, work out what your unanswered calls are actually worth. If the monthly loss is smaller than the fee, don't buy it - we'd rather you found that out now.
Kounta was built in Sydney. It is now a product line inside Lightspeed Commerce, a company founded in Montreal in 2005 by Dax Dasilva and listed on both the Toronto and New York exchanges as LSPD. Lightspeed reported revenue of US$1.076 billion in its 2025 financial year and employs around 3,000 people. It did not start in hospitality at all: it was a retail point of sale business until 2014, when it bought the Belgian startup POSIOS and entered restaurants.
Since then it has grown mostly by acquisition. It bought ShopKeep in November 2020 for US$440 million, and in March 2021 it bought Vend, the Auckland-founded retail software company, for US$350 million. It has an office in Melbourne. Source: the Wikipedia article on Lightspeed Commerce and the filings and press it cites, read 31 August 2026.
Two practical consequences follow from that history, and neither is a criticism.
The naming is inconsistent and that is not your imagination. Depending on when you signed up and which plan you are on, your invoices, your login and your support articles may say Kounta, Lightspeed Restaurant, or both. Anything connecting to your till, including us, has to handle the same underlying system under several names. If you are not sure which one you are on, the answer is on your billing email, not on your screen.
A roll-up builds sideways, not down. Lightspeed's product energy over the last decade went into buying retail, e-commerce, payments and loyalty and stitching them together. That is a reasonable strategy and it is why the platform covers so much ground. It also means the thing nobody in that stack has ever built is the thing on the wall that rings. Your till knows the menu, the modifiers, the sold-out items and the prices. It has never once answered a handset.
The reason a phone agent is worth connecting to a point of sale rather than running beside it is that the till is already the single source of truth for the things callers ask about. We read four of them.
What we do not do is write anything back into your product setup. We read the menu, we send orders. We do not edit prices, we do not create products and we do not change your settings. If a menu item is wrong in Kounta it will be wrong on the phone, which is the correct behaviour: one place to fix it.
Yes, and it is worth being clear because the two get confused. Online ordering takes an order from someone who has already found your site, chosen to order, and is holding a screen. A phone agent takes an order from someone who rang. Those are different customers and, in most venues we look at, different age groups and different order sizes.
They also fail differently. An online order never gets missed, it just never happens if the customer does not visit. A phone order is a customer who has already decided to buy from you and is being turned away by a busy tone. That is the specific loss this connection closes, and it is why a venue with good online ordering can still be losing money on the handset.
If you want the wider argument rather than the Kounta-specific one, our page on an AI phone ordering system for takeaways covers it, and does an AI receptionist actually work sets out where the technology fails.
Setup takes five days and almost all of the work is ours. From you we need four things: access to your Kounta or Lightspeed account so the menu can be read, your current call divert settings from your phone provider, your trading hours and booking rules, and half an hour of someone senior testing it against real calls before it goes live.
Your phone number does not change. Your handset does not change. The divert can be set to trigger only after four or five rings, so a fully staffed lunch behaves exactly as it does today and only the calls nobody reaches fall through to the agent. That configuration is the one we recommend for most venues, and it is the one that makes the monthly fee easiest to justify, because it only earns when you are stretched.
If you are weighing this against simply rostering someone near the phone, our page on hospitality wages in New Zealand has the current rates to compare against, and what to do when staff call in sick covers the weeks when that plan falls over.
Fifteen minutes, your Kounta menu, your hardest order. Bring the one your staff get wrong.
Book a Free DemoYes. Kounta and Lightspeed Restaurant are the same platform under different names depending on when you signed up. Skai connects either way.
No. You keep your existing number and divert calls to Skai. The divert can be switched on and off - during service only, after hours only, or all the time.
Five days from sign-up to live calls. The one-off setup fee covers the menu build, the POS connection and voice tuning for your venue.
Skai transfers the call to your team. It takes the routine volume off your floor and escalates anything that genuinely needs a human.
See every POS Skai connects to, or Skai for New Zealand venues.