Toast Mobile Payments, Restaurant Services Nets Hefty Series D Round

July 16, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Toast and its fundraising efforts; in fact, almost a year ago today, we heard about another funding round from Toast that brought in cash sufficient for the company to consider new hiring. Now, it’s completed a Series D financing round that left the company up a hefty $115 million.

Toast offers up several tools for restaurant management, including one tool that gets our attention, the mobile point-of-sale (PoS) device known as Toast Go, which helps bring more mobile operations to just about any restaurant. With its newfound funding, the company plans to not only bring in some more new hires, but also ramp up its research and development operations as well as its marketing efforts.

Leading the way on the Series D was a slate of funds and accounts that T. Rowe Price Associates advises, as well as some help from a new investor, Tiger Global Management LLC. Several existing investors also came back for more, and with this latest funding round, Toast is now valued at $1.4 billion.

Word from T. Rowe Price’s New Horizons Fund portfolio manager Henry Ellenbogen explains just why the group took such an interest in Toast, saying “The way restaurants serve their customers is going through a fundamental change, and the technology that enables restaurant operations must respond to these new demands. Toast does this. Our investment in Toast reflects our belief in the firm’s ability to become much larger over time. We look forward to working with Toast’s management team as they help their clients and grow the business.”

Toast’s systems have been helping to bring more mobile options to restaurants for some time now, and with this latest infusion of cash, it will likely be able to continue doing so, as well as bring out new options from there. With major chain restaurants turning to mobile functions like mobile order-ahead and mobile payments, it requires smaller restaurants to do likewise or risk getting swamped by their bigger competitors.

Tools like those Toast can offer may help make the mobile transition easier, and that in and of itself makes Toast a valuable proposition. Maybe not $1.4 billion valuable, but certainly valuable on some level.