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Oliver Roy

Leav is a tech company that offers a comprehensive mobile shopping platform giving customers the ability to manage their purchases in-store by simply scanning a QR code. Retailers benefit from the Leav solution as it frees up sales staff to focus on customer service and provides business intelligence data for improved operational efficiencies. It takes five seconds to checkout with Leav as compared to an average of five minutes with the traditional method, making the experience 10x faster.

Leav believes that the future of retail is in-store and that the customer should always be the center of the shopping journey.

Tell us about yourself?

Olivier Roy is Co-founder and CEO of Leav. After working with many organizations, including the Government of Quebec and the Government of Cameroon, he decided to combine his passion for technology with his experiences in marketing to solve a problem that follows him everywhere: long retail lineups – and co-founded Leav.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

I would tell myself that building a startup is hard, and the process will be full of failures and learning opportunities. Trust your guts and set the bar high, but don’t expect magic to happen! Especially in B2B, acquiring new customers is a long journey.

What problem does your business solve?

  • Leav helps retailers with the rising labour shortage problem. They can keep normal hours and not be understaffed.
  • The platform removes lineups and redirects staff to sales and customer service.
  • It provides a hyper-personalized retail experience based on shoppers’ needs.
  • Leav gives the retailer an online-data level of accuracy in-store. Something you can’t have with traditional checkouts.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

In November 2019, I was in a restaurant with two friends, and when we were ready to pay the bill, it took 20 minutes to get it. That’s when we started discussing how annoying the wait time was and that there had to be a better way to settle a tab. And that’s how we came up with Leav. The platform was developed for self-driven checkout, and while we were initially targeting restaurants, the pandemic hit, and the industry started shutting down. We began exploring options for alternative applications and after securing our first round of financing from an angel investor, we decided to pivot and cater to the retail industry with the same goal: to reduce long checkout lines.

On December 1, 2020, we opened our first ‘fully cashier less’ store in Canada and Leav was live!

What is your magic sauce?

The magic sauce of Leav is our team. We built and designed the platform from the consumers’ perspective and objectively assessed it to ensure that it offered a solution that most would embrace.

In terms of technology, we developed an architecture that is scalable. It can support millions of users simultaneously with no latency. As far as pricing, we are very competitive as our solution doesn’t require additional hardware for it to be deployed. Leav can offer value to an entire chain at the price of a few self-checkout kiosks!

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

We want to be synonymous with a fast and great shopping experience like ‘’Uber’’ is with ‘taking a cab.’

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

In March 2020, when the pandemic hit, it was a shock for all of us! We didn’t know what was going to happen, and all we were experiencing were restaurant closures. That is when we decided to pivot and redesign our entire technology for the retail industry. That was our first big challenge.

Now we are facing a new one: scaling our business and getting large retailers to partner with us.

How can people get involved?

Are you a retailer facing labour shortage issues? Or are you a customer annoyed with long lineups wherever you go? Let’s connect and explore ways to work together and drive efficient shopping experiences.

See how Leav can help your business by emailing us directly at hello@leav.co