Just 16 months ago, Toast CEO Chris Comparato laid off half of the company’s employees, laid off 1,300, laid off hundreds, and reduced executive pay. Restaurants that use toast fees and order software cut their sales by a quarter as they waived $ 20 million in customer payments on Friday.
But toast toast is faster than the overall recovery in a restaurant, with software helping to accept online orders, coordinate offers, issue gift cards, and email marketing. The company has partnered with shipping services such as Dr. Dash, which allows restaurants to pay flat fees for each order rather than the order percentage.
“A year ago, COVID was bad for toast, but toast moved quickly to meet the demand for their restaurants and took the company to a whole new level,” said Eric Paley, co-founder and co-founder of Enterprise Capital. Not involved with the company.
From mid-2019 to mid-2020, the number of restaurants using toast equipment and software doubled to 33,129, the company said. And served 47,942 by mid-2021.
“This is just the beginning of our journey,” said co-founders Stephen Freddit, Aman Narang and John Grim in an application to the Security and Exchange Commission. Our goal of being a platform for restaurants around the world is wide and can take us in many directions.
The company declined interview questions on Friday.
In the first half of 2021, toast revenue doubled to $ 704 million in 2020. The company’s net loss increased by $ 885 million by 88 percent by 2020. Toast Restaurant customers’ sales through the system increased by 125 percent. In the first half of 2021, it was $ 23.4 billion compared to a year ago.
An online order during the epidemic also boosted Dreslin, a Boston-based alcohol supply company that bought Uber for $ 1.1 billion in February. And the introduction of toast IPO comes just days after another Boston-based technology company, Spice, bought the national salad chain Sweetgreen.
Toast’s IPO could be valued at $ 20 billion or more, at least by generating billionaires on paper and making more profit for corporate capital companies that have funded the company, including Besemmer Venture Partners and Steve Papa’s Technology Investment Group. (Papa, a former investor, was the founder of Endica, a software company he used to run before to buy Oracle in 2011.)
The planned stock market supply comes at a time when some toast competitors are gaining traction. Square stocks rose 75 percent last year, Lapsed traded up more than 200 percent, and Fiserv, the owner of the Toast rival Clover Network, grew 20 percent.
Despite the competition, the company claims that only 6 percent of restaurants in the United States use their services, and that it has the potential to continue growing. And the world restaurant industry is more than 20 times that.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan lead the IPO.
Globe staff Anisa Gardizi and Pranchu Verma contributed to this report.
Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @ampressman.