Toast

Toast, Inc. is an American cloud-based restaurant management software company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. The company provides an all-in-one point of sale system built on Android, serving restaurants, bars, and other food-service operators across the United States.

Official Website

Technology

1 Episode

The Story

Toast was founded in 2012 by Aman Narang, Steve Fredette, and Jonathan Grimm as a cloud-based restaurant technology company based in Boston, Massachusetts. The founders initially built a consumer mobile payments and loyalty app, but shifted to an industry-specific point of sale system after realizing restaurants needed a simpler, integrated alternative to legacy POS setups.

The company's first product was an Android-powered all-in-one POS platform combining hardware terminals, payment processing, kitchen displays, and back-office software. That focus allowed Toast to expand from a small startup into a system used by roughly 120,000 U.S. restaurants. Major growth milestones included a $400 million Series F in 2020, a secondary sale valuing the business near $8 billion later that year, and an initial public offering on the NYSE under the ticker TOST in 2021.

Today Toast operates as a public company with thousands of employees, continuing to add restaurant-focused capabilities such as reservations, drive-thru display systems, and analytics tools. The business remains headquartered in Boston's Seaport District and is publicly traded as a restaurant-technology and payments platform.

Key Facts & Metrics

📅 Founded 2012

📍 Boston, Massachusetts

👥 1000+

Company Timeline

2012 — Toast founded in Boston
Aman Narang, Steve Fredette, and Jonathan Grimm founded Toast as a cloud-based point of sale company focused on restaurants.
2020 — Series F funding and secondary sale
Toast raised $400 million in Series F funding at a $4.9 billion valuation and later completed a secondary sale valuing the company at roughly $8 billion.
2021 — NYSE IPO under ticker TOST
Toast went public with an IPO priced at $40 per share, debuting with a market capitalization of roughly $20 billion.
2023 — Acquired Delphi Display Systems
Toast expanded its restaurant technology footprint by acquiring Delphi Display Systems, adding drive-thru and digital display solutions.
2024 — Moved to new Seaport District headquarters
Toast relocated its headquarters to a new Summer Street location in Boston's Seaport District as headcount and product lines continued growing.

Episodes Featuring Toast

EP 854

Toast: Aman Narang. How a Long Wait for the Dinner Check Launched a $2 Billion Business.

Aman Narang

Toast

After waiting too long to pay his restaurant bill, Aman Narang thought there had to be a better way. His first idea - a mobile payment app - flopped, but that failure revealed a much bigger opportunity. Restaurants were trapped by outdated, expensive point-of-sale systems locked to on-premise servers. So Aman and his co-founders built Toast, a cloud-based operating system for restaurants from scratch. They worked from an unfinished basement, crashed their first launch, survived investor rejection and COVID, and grew Toast into a company that now powers more than 20 percent of U.S. restaurants.

Jul 20, 202651 min

Founders Featured

Aman Narang

Aman Narang is the co-founder and CEO of Toast, a point of sale platform for restaurants. After an earlier startup failed, he launched Toast in 2012 to fix restaurant checkout. Under his leadership, Toast grew from a Boston basement into a publicly traded company serving 120,000 U.S. restaurants.

1 episode