Toast Announces $101 Million in Additional Funding

Toast, the all-in-one restaurant technology platform has received a commitment for an additional $101 million in financing led by new investors Generation Investment Management and Lead Edge Capital. Existing investors including Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in the oversubscribed round. Toast plans to use these new funds to continue building its guest experience cloud platform for restaurants of all sizes.

“The restaurant industry has historically been slower than others to adopt technology, leading to operational inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Advances in hardware, software and cloud computing are shifting that dynamic,” said Greg Wasserman, Partner at Generation Investment Management. “Toast is leading this digital shift with its powerful, yet easy-to-deploy platform that is democratizing access to best-in-class technology. With Toast, all restaurants can maximize revenue, optimize operations, digitize paper processes, reduce food waste and other costs, and ultimately deliver a superior dining experience.”

Innovation

Toast will use this funding to build on its track record of innovation, including:

• Investing further in Toast Online Ordering, enabling a best-in-class ordering experience across various devices and channels 
• Enhancing key areas of the platform such as self-ordering kiosks, handheld pay-at the-table experiences, CRM and marketing tools, advanced reporting, inventory, loyalty, and more 
• Creating the industry’s most robust cloud-based restaurant platform, including modern, commercial grade hardware
• Leveraging the immense amount of data restaurants collect to enable a more personalized guest experience and improve labor and food cost profiles

"We’ve rapidly expanded our business over the past year by delivering on our mission and promise to be obsessed with customer success," said Chris Comparato, CEO of Toast. "We plan to accelerate our growth even faster in the year ahead with strategic investments that will help our restaurant customers focus on delivering great food and guest experiences."

Toast Customers and Partners

“We found that the Toast POS system is fast and intuitive for our cashiers to use. During peak times, we can process about 20 percent more transactions after introducing Toast to our restaurants,” said Jeff Jacobson, COO of Costa Vida. “Our team has been with Toast since 2015; they are a true partner and a key factor in our ability to focus on excellent service and great food.”

Joe Guenther, the owner of O’Maddy’s, an iconic Florida-based restaurant and bar, echoed, “We never expected that we could bring the ‘Apple Store experience’ to our restaurant. Handheld tablet ordering resulted in faster table-turns and increased revenue by 20 percent. At our restaurant, this equates to a potential increase in revenue by $1 million.”

In addition to Costa Vida and O’Maddy’s Bar & Grille, Toast’s 50+ midmarket and enterprise-level customers include Pieology, Beef 'O' Brady's, Bareburger, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, b.good, The Human Bean, Protein Bar and Sticky Fingers Ribhouse. The Toast API Partner Program boasts integrations with companies like Grubhub, Samsung Pay, Paytronix and LevelUp. Toast continues to add local restaurants to its growing customer list from small coffee shops to fine dining.

"From its differentiated, all-in-one restaurant management and point of sale solution, to its explosive growth and world-class team of cloud technology engineers with a passion for restaurants, we know Toast is the future of restaurant technology," said Brian Neider, Partner at Lead Edge Capital. "Out of all the feedback we gained from key players in the restaurant and food technology space, Toast customers and partners had an overwhelming sentiment of excellent product and customer success feedback.”

Growth and Hiring

The investment will also support the company’s hiring plan to double year-over-year; key appointments thus far include Hugh Scandrett, Vice President of Engineering, formerly of IBM and Kronos, as well as John Morrison, Vice President of Services, who joins Toast from Oracle MICROS. Toast currently boasts more than 500 employees nationwide, and is on track to hire nearly 1,000 more in the next 18 months.