Five years ago this week, point of sale and payments company Toast went public. Its shares hit the market well above expectations over a year into the pandemic as Wall Street embraced restaurant technology.
Then, the story was about the cloud-based point of sale company with a cute logo that wanted to do it all. Today, the question is how far Toast plans to go.
Since Toast’s market debut in 2021, its market share has grown from about 1 in 20 small and midsize restaurants in the U.S. to 1 in 5. Restaurants on the platform are paying more, on average: revenue per restaurant is up from about $8,000 to $13,0001 over the last five years, Aman Narang, the company’s CEO, estimated during a September Goldman Sachs conference.
During this time, Toast introduced a host of new products and integrations, including a budding partnership with reservations platform Resy and an AI-powered assistant, Toast IQ, to help restaurants make sense of all of the data it collects. At this point, calling Toast a “point of sale and payments company” understates its importance and position in the market.
The company agrees.