Toast, Inc.

Who founded Toast? Steve Fredette, Aman Narang, and Jonathan Grimm founded the company in Boston in 2011 after working together at Endeca. It was incorporated as Opti Systems in December 2011 and renamed Toast in May 2012.

Is Toast publicly traded? Yes. Toast lists Class A shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker TOST and is a member of the S&P 400.

How does Toast make money? Mostly from payment processing fees on the $195.1 billion in gross payment volume it handled in FY2025. Subscription software and hardware make up the rest of its $6.15 billion in revenue.

What is Toast Tables? Toast Tables is the company's restaurant reservation and waitlist product, launched in April 2023. It competes with OpenTable and Resy and integrates with the Toast POS system.

Where is Toast headquartered? 333 Summer Street in the Seaport District of Boston, Massachusetts.

Is Toast profitable? Yes. Toast reported $342 million in GAAP net income for FY2025, its first substantially profitable year, along with $633 million in adjusted EBITDA.

Steve Fredette, Aman Narang, and Jonathan Grimm founded the company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was incorporated in Delaware in December 2011 as Opti Systems, Inc. and renamed Toast, Inc. in May 2012. The founders had worked together at Endeca, the enterprise search company Oracle bought in 2011.

Early Toast sold a consumer-facing mobile payments app for restaurants before pivoting to the Android-based POS system that became its core. Venture backing came from Bessemer Venture Partners, GV, and Tiger Global, among others, and a 2018 round valued the company at $1.4 billion. A 2020 funding round pushed the valuation to roughly $8 billion weeks before the pandemic collapsed restaurant transaction volume; Toast cut about half its staff that April.

The recovery was fast. Toast listed on the NYSE in September 2021 at a valuation near $20 billion. It expanded its suite with payroll (via the 2019 StratEx acquisition), xtraCHEF for back-office cost management, and Toast Tables, its reservation product launched in April 2023 that put it in direct competition with OpenTable and Resy. Co-founder Aman Narang became CEO in 2024 after Chip Comin's brief tenure, and FY2025 marked the company's first broadly profitable year at scale, with $342 million in net income.

Toast publishes workforce diversity data and runs community programs for restaurant workers, including relief fund partnerships. As a payments company its direct environmental footprint is limited to offices and hardware logistics.

The company drew criticism in 2020 for layoffs executed weeks after raising a large funding round. Like other payment processors it is exposed to interchange fee litigation and regulatory debate over card network fees, and restaurant customers periodically complain about processing rate increases and contract terms.