Toast Lands Hefty New Funding Round, Looking to Hire

July 31, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

Restaurants are constantly looking for ways to improve the customer experience and keep customers coming back for more. At least, the good ones generally are. Toast, which provides a point-of-sale system geared toward the restaurant trade, just landed a hefty nine-figure investment round and is looking to do some serious hiring to get users on board to help drive its progress forward.

The funding round—which brought in a hefty $101 million—was led by Lead Edge Capital and Al Gore-cofounded firm Generation Investment Management. They weren’t alone, as former investors returned to the well to have another go, including Bessemer Venture Partners.

Toast wants to take that cash and bring in 1,000 new people over the next year and a half to help drive its operations forward, getting the Toast system into more restaurants. Toast has a substantial offering on hand already, especially since back in May when Grubhub integrated with Toast—as well as with Breadcrumb—to make for a complete system that can track and manage orders from placement to delivery all from one system.

Generation Investment Management’s Greg Wasserman commented “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. Toast is leading this digital shift with its powerful, yet easy-to-deploy platform that is democratizing access to best-in-class technology.”

Bringing more technology to restaurants isn’t a bad idea; aside from a few changes in some locations, restaurants today are much the same as they were before mobile payments started up, which is to say about the same as they’ve been for decades, even centuries. With the new changes, like Toast, it becomes possible to streamline an experience, get more diners in and out, improve profitability per seat, and all without any of the diners feeling rushed. That’s a win-win situation.


Granted, restaurants generally run on hair-fine margins, so the ability or interest in major new technological investments isn’t always there. Making those investments, however, has the potential to improve those margins substantially, and make it worth putting the cash. That and more cash on hand means less resistance to future change, which should make further adoptions a bit smoother.