What smart money is saying about Toast, Inc.
3 funds in our archive have pitched Toast, Inc., most recently Mayar Capital Responsible Global Equity Fund in September 2026.
Toast, Inc. delivers a comprehensive cloud-based digital technology platform tailored specifically for the restaurant sector, serving businesses across the United States and Ireland. Its extensive product suite features an array of hardware solutions, including the foundational Toast Point of Sale (POS) system. Toast Flex offers versatile functionality, adaptable as an on-counter order and payment terminal, a server workstation, a guest kiosk, a kitchen display system, or an order fulfillment hub. For enhanced tableside service and expedited table turnover, the company provides Toast Go, a handheld POS device facilitating ordering and payment acceptance directly at the table, alongside Toast Tap, a compact card reader. Beyond hardware, Toast supplies robust software solutions. Toast Order & Pay empowers guests to place orders and settle bills conveniently from their mobile devices. The platform integrates specialized kitchen display system software, streamlining communication between front-of-house staff and the kitchen team. For larger operations, multi-location management software enables customers to centralize operational control, standardize procedures, and efficiently configure menus. Back-office administrative tasks are supported by xtraCHEF tools. Furthermore, Toast Flex for Kitchen provides a larger, mountable hardware solution designed specifically as a kitchen screen. Regarding customer engagement and logistics, Toast offers the Toast Online Ordering & Toast TakeOut app, a software platform enabling restaurants to accept off-premises orders directly through their branded websites. For delivery, they provide First-Party Delivery services, allowing restaurants to manage their own driver fleets and customize delivery parameters such as hours, zones, fees, and minimum order values. Additionally, Toast Delivery Services connects restaurants with a network of third-party delivery drivers, complemented by broader Toast Delivery Partners services. The company's offerings extend to comprehensive business support services. These encompass loyalty programs and gift card management, payroll and team administration tools, tailored business owner policy insurance with restaurant-specific enhancements, and efficient payment processing solutions. Toast also facilitates financial support through loans advanced to restaurants and purchase financing options. Detailed reporting and analytics solutions provide valuable insights. For broader integration, Toast Partner Connect allows users to discover, select, and seamlessly integrate with various third-party partners via bi-directional APIs. Established in 2011, Toast, Inc. maintains its headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts.
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Position history
Between Q2 2025 and Q3 2026, 5 fund letters reported a position in Toast, Inc., with 2 buys (opened or added) and 1 sell (trimmed or exited).
| Quarter | Letters | Bought | Sold | Theses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q3 2026 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Q2 2026 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Q1 2026 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Q3 2025 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Q2 2025 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
Bought and Sold count moves: the same sentence published by several funds of one house in a quarter counts once.
Fund activity · 5 positions · 3 moves
- September 2026
“Boston, MA, USA Founded: 2012Toast, Inc. © 2026 Toast Inc. Business Summary 19Business Summary Dine out in America today and you may notice that the ritual of the meal has quietly changed. The waiter’s notepad has given way to a slim handheld tablet; orders reach the kitchen before he has stepped away from the table, and when the plates are cleared the bill is settled with a tap of a card or phone. In roughly 180,000 locations, the vast majority of them American restaurants, the waiter’s tablet bears the name Toast, a company that in barely a decade has become the backbone of American restaurant technology and the leading point-of-sale system in the country. Toast was founded in Boston in 2012 by Steve Fredette, Aman Narang and Jonathan Grimm. Their first product was a smartphone app that let diners pay from their seats, after which they decided to build an alternative point-of-sale product for restaurants. This was a hugely ambitious project: dominant incumbents such as Micros and NCR were heavily entrenched in the restaurant industry – indeed, one venture capitalist who later backed them confessed that the entire enterprise sounded like ‘a suicide mission’. Even making the handheld tablet work demanded a small feat of engineering. Rather than adapt consumer iPads, as many rivals did, Toast built its system on Google’s open Android platform and designed its own hardware. A restaurant is a hostile place for electronics: devices are dropped on tile floors, splashed with coffee, wine and beer, coated in fryer grease, and carried from a hot, humid kitchen into a walk-in freezer and back again. Toast’s terminals and handhelds are put through exactly these trials in its own labs before they reach a customer. The result is a device a server can trust in the middle of a Saturday-night rush, precisely when a restaurant can least afford its till to fail. © 2026 Toast Inc. Today Toast is the operating system for restaurants ranging from neighbourhood coffee shops to national chains such as Applebee’s and Topgolf. On a single platform, a restaurant can run its front of house, kitchen screens, online ordering, payroll, staff scheduling, marketing, loyalty and inventory, and even borrow working capital, with every module drawing on the same data. The business model is attractive. Toast earns recurring subscription fees for its software and a margin on the card payments it processes, so its revenues grow both with the number of locations it serves and with the volume of meals they sell. Each additional module a restaurant adopts deepens the relationship and raises switching costs: replacing the system that runs the till, the kitchen and the payroll is not something a busy owner undertakes lightly. The economics of winning a customer are compelling. Equally important, Toast bundled payment processing with its software from the outset, earning a small share of every transaction that passed through its customers’ tills, a stream of income that has funded the company’s growth ever since. Toast spends roughly USD 20,000 to sign and install a new location, an outlay that pays back in around two years and earns a return of about 50% thereafter.”
Toast, Inc. - HoldsOptimist FundJune 2026
Listed in Optimist Fund’s reported holdings.
Toast, Inc. - AddedMayar CapitalJune 2026
“We added to a number of existing holdings: Nike, Toast, SAP, Unilever, Mastercard, Nintendo and Booking.”
Toast, Inc. - New positionBrown Advisory Mid‑Cap GrowthMarch 2026
“We also built six new positions, including in two companies we believe are being disproportionately penalized in the software rout—Toast, Inc (TOST) and Guidewire Software, Inc (GWRE).”
Toast, Inc. - September 2025
“we sold 7 positions to zero in Q3: o six in technology: Tyler Technologies, CyberArk Software, Salesforce, Atlassian, ARM Holdings, Toast”
Toast, Inc.
Also mentioned · 2
These funds discuss Toast, Inc. as a competitor, benchmark or comparable, without disclosing a position in it.
- MentionedEmeth Value CapitalJune 2026
“By 2021, Shift4’s restaurant platform encompassed roughly 75,000 locations spread across Harbortouch, Restaurant Manager, POSitouch, and Future POS. While the POS acquisition strategy had proved its merits many times over – end-to-end payment volume in the restaurant vertical increased 5.2x, or by more than $20 billion, between 2017 and 2021 – it had also left Shift4 maintaining a sprawling legacy codebase of four Windows-era systems, each requiring overlapping engineering and support personnel. Worse, the aging estate had become a sitting target. Toast was growing exponentially, surpassing 50,000 U.S. restaurant locations in 2021, and it was increasingly clear that Shift4’s existing POS portfolio was not equipped to compete effectively for net new merchants.”
Toast, Inc. - September 2023
“Q: What are the major trends in VMS single vertical software? Vertical market software: single vertical companies like Procore, Veeva, AppFolio, and Toast have been able to grow to huge sizes in recent years. This is in part because they each service very large end-market verticals.”
Toast, Inc.
Fund coverage · 3 theses
- Mayar Capital Responsible Global Equity FundSeptember 2026
Toast, Inc. is a restaurant technology platform with recurring software and payments revenue, strong switching costs, attractive unit economics, and multiple growth avenues including AI and international expansion.
Read the full thesis - Brown Advisory Mid‑Cap GrowthMarch 2026
Toast is a restaurant software leader with long runway for location growth, expanding verticals, and a widening competitive advantage.
Read the full thesis - NZS CapitalJune 2025
Toast is a restaurant-focused software and payment processing platform that combines SaaS and payments, demonstrating strong potential for profitability and growth through local network effects and expansion into the enterprise market.
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