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

Aman Narang's Bio

Aman Narang is the co-founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Director of Toast, Inc., the Boston-based cloud restaurant management platform best known for its Android-powered point of sale system.

Before Toast, Narang was part of an earlier venture in consumer mobile payments and loyalty, an experience that gave him direct exposure to the difficulties restaurants faced with checkout, payments, and operational tooling. Rather than pursue another generic payments app, he shifted focus to an industry-specific solution and co-founded Toast alongside Steve Fredette and Jonathan Grimm. The company started in Narang's basement in 2012 with the goal of building an all-in-one system tailored to restaurants.

Under his leadership, Toast developed an integrated suite built around its Android-based POS hardware and software, including terminal displays, payment processing, kitchen printers, and later reservation and analytics tools. The business expanded from a local startup into a platform used in approximately 120,000 U.S. restaurants. Major milestones include a $400 million Series F in 2020, a public offering on the NYSE under the ticker TOST in 2021, and continued growth into drive-thru and display technology through acquisitions.

Narang is known for keeping the company's culture close to its restaurant-customer roots, often emphasizing that Toast's product decisions are driven by operators on the ground rather than abstract tech trends. He remains the public face of the company's mission to simplify and modernize restaurant technology.

Career Timeline

2012 — Co-founded Toast
Launched Toast with Steve Fredette and Jonathan Grimm as a cloud-based point of sale platform for restaurants.
2020 — Led Toast through Series F and pandemic layoffs
Oversaw a $400 million Series F funding round at a $4.9 billion valuation, then led the company through difficult COVID-19-driven workforce reductions before a strong rebound.
2021 — Took Toast public on the NYSE
Toast went public under the ticker TOST with an IPO priced at $40 per share, one of the largest U.S. tech debuts of that year.
2024 — Expanded Toast headquarters and product reach
Moved into a new Seaport District headquarters as Toast continued scaling its restaurant-management platform and display technology acquisitions.

Episodes

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

Related Companies

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.

1 episode