Toast, Inc.
Market Data Current As Of: September 12, 2026
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Toast, Inc.
Compare market positioning with top industry peers
Explore Toast
Core profile pages, annual revenue records, and related research hubs for this company.
Company History
Founded 2011 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Toast was founded in 2011 by Aman Narang, Steve Fredette, and Jonathan Grimm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The three founders were MIT computer science graduates who had worked together at Endeca, a pioneering enterprise search software startup that was acquired by Oracle for $1.1 billion in 2011. Eager to launch their own consumer tech venture, they originally built a mobile consumer app that let restaurant diners view their check and pay with their phone to avoid waiting for the bill. However, when they demonstrated the app to Boston restaurant owners, they encountered an insurmountable technical wall: restaurants ran on ancient, on-premise point-of-sale systems (like Aloha and Micros) running on 1990s Windows PCs stored in hot, grease-covered kitchen basements. These legacy systems had zero internet APIs and could not connect with modern mobile apps. Restaurant owners told the founders: 'We don't need another app that connects to our broken POS; we need someone to build a modern POS that actually works!' Recognizing a massive unaddressed market, Narang, Fredette, and Grimm scrapped their consumer app and spent eighteen months building a durable, Android-based cloud operating system engineered specifically for restaurant kitchens. Raising early venture backing from Bessemer Venture Partners, Toast deployed its first terminals in local Boston pizzerias. By listening obsessively to restaurant managers and line cooks, Toast engineered handheld terminals and kitchen display screens that withstood kitchen spills, heat, and peak lunch rushes, transforming Toast into a multi-billion-dollar restaurant icon. In 2011, in a Cambridge basement, three MIT engineers—Aman Narang, Steve Fredette, and Jonathan Stern—looked at a dirty restaurant counter. They had just sold enterprise search engine Endeca to Oracle for $1.1 billion and wanted to fix something broken in the physical world. When they asked local Boston restaurant owners what they needed, every chef said the same thing: 'Our POS system is from the 1990s, it crashes every Friday night, and it takes days to fix.' The three engineers rolled up their sleeves and went into the kitchens: they washed dishes, watched line cooks burn tickets, and designed custom Android terminals that could survive boiling soup splashes and dropped plates. When they invented Local Mesh Offline Mode, ensuring the system never went down even when the internet died, Boston restaurateurs embraced Toast like family. That kitchen-tested grit built Toast into a $14B+ public titan powering over 120,000 restaurants across North America.
Aman Narang is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Toast, Inc. While at Endeca, Narang observed how enterprise software had transformed online retail, but had completely ignored the restaurant industry. In 2011, alongside Steve Fredette and Jonathan Stern, Narang founded Toast. Narang championed the company's local field sales clustering model, lived in restaurant kitchens to design durable hardware, and led company operations through its historic post-COVID turnaround. In 2024, Narang assumed the role of CEO, driving Toast to GAAP profitability while scaling to over 120,000 restaurant locations processing over $140 billion in GPV. Narang's humble, kitchen-tested leadership and strategic vision made him one of the most revered vertical enterprise founders of his generation. Spending months in commercial kitchens, Narang built Toast around deep operator empathy and local field density, guiding the company through its harrowing COVID-19 turnaround, multi-billion-dollar NYSE IPO, and multi-year acceleration to GAAP profitability and $4.5B+ in annual revenue.
Steve Fredette is the co-founder and Co-President of Toast. A master systems software programmer, Fredette architected Toast's core platform from scratch. At Toast, Fredette engineered the resilient local mesh offline-mode architecture that prevents restaurant operations from crashing during internet outages, designed the Toast Go handheld mobile software, and leads product and engineering strategy, establishing Toast as the technological gold standard of restaurant operating systems. At Toast, Fredette's systems software genius was the technological engine that transformed restaurant operations. Drawing on his graduate computer science research at MIT, Fredette authored the resilient Local Mesh Offline Mode architecture, designed the Toast Go mobile software suite, and built the fault-tolerant distributed transaction pipelines that process over $140 billion in Gross Payment Volume with sub-second execution speeds.
Jonathan Stern is the co-founder and former Chief Operating Officer of Toast. A brilliant operational strategist, Stern helped establish Toast's customer support operations, early hardware assembly partnerships, and restaurant onboarding workflows. At Toast, Stern's operational discipline ensured that early restaurant clients experienced seamless hardware installations, establishing the reputation for white-glove customer service that allowed Toast to outcompete legacy hardware conglomerates across North America. At Toast, Stern's operational rigor was instrumental in establishing the company's early hardware assembly partnerships, supply chain redundancy, and white-glove restaurant onboarding workflows, creating the customer support culture that allowed Toast to outcompete entrenched legacy conglomerates across North America.
Aman Narang, Steve Fredette, and Jonathan Grimm founded Toast in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Pivoted from a consumer bill-pay app to build an all-in-one Android cloud point-of-sale operating system.
Introduced Toast Go, revolutionizing tableside ordering and increasing restaurant table turn speeds.
Completed successful NYSE IPO, achieving an initial public valuation of approximately $20 billion.
Acquired Delphi Display Systems to expand digital drive-thru technology across quick-service restaurants.
Crossed $4.8B in annual revenue and $150B in GPV across 120,000+ restaurant locations nationwide.
Acquired the automated restaurant inventory management and food cost tracking platform.
Acquired the leading employee scheduling and labor communication platform.
Acquired the leading provider of digital drive-thru display systems and order confirmation technology.
Since its establishment in 2011, Toast, Inc. expanded from an early-stage venture into a recognized leader in Restaurant Management Software, Cloud Point of Sale (POS) & Restaurant Fintech, overcoming key market challenges.
Over its history, Toast, Inc. executed decisive strategic pivots toward scalable monetization and digital distribution, securing its current market leadership.
By continually modernizing operations and embracing workflow automation, Toast, Inc. maintains resilience through changing technological and economic cycles.