Toast, Inc.—the all-in-one, cloud-based restaurant software company—surged past $30 billion in market capitalization after launching its IPO late last month, making the company’s three co-founders instant billionaires based on each of their shares. Steve Fredette, Aman Narang, and Jonathan Grimm founded Toast in 2012 after their previous employer, software company Endeca, was acquired by Oracle for $1 billion. The trio initially conceived of Toast as a consumer app for mobile payments and loyalty points that integrated with restaurants’ existing point-of-sale platforms; they later pivoted and revamped their platform into a full restaurant technology platform that unified POS, online ordering, back-of-house functionality, analytics, and more. Toast’s IPO turned out to be the biggest to emerge from the Boston-area thus far.
Fredette, Narang, and Grimm hold varying numbers of shares, anywhere between 24 million and 32 million each, that raise their collective net worth to approximately $5 billion. The co-founders and other insiders are restricted from selling stock for 180 days post-IPO, so their fortunes could see continued growth or unexpected losses depending on Toast’s performance on Wall Street. Restaurant revenues are on the way up again after the COVID-19 pandemic led to a protracted period of struggles for the service and hospitality industry, and Toast’s three co-founders are the latest entrepreneurs to benefit.
