Elena Gomez, President and CFO of Toast (NYSE: TOST), sat down with Julia Boorstin to discuss how the company is turning its restaurant network into a data-driven competitive moat. The anchor of her argument was straightforward: “We power over 160,000 restaurants. So you can imagine the data that sits in our platform.”
Toast ended 2025 with approximately 164,000 total restaurant locations globally, up 22% year over year, adding a record 30,000 net new locations across the full year. The company has grown from roughly 140,000 locations at the start of 2025 to a network that now spans the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia.
Data as a product, not just a byproduct
Gomez highlighted Toast’s benchmarking product as a concrete example of how that data creates value for operators. The platform can tell a restaurant owner that a cheeseburger costs $12 on average across the US, and if they are not at that price point, it is an opportunity worth examining. That kind of insight, drawn from aggregated transaction data across tens of thousands of locations, is difficult for any single-restaurant software vendor to replicate.
Regarding AI: it is not a question of “if” but “how fast” Toast can drive innovation with it. She noted she personally uses AI every day. The company has already launched Toast IQ, a conversational AI assistant for restaurants that includes menu upsells, shift-at-a-glance operational visibility, an AI marketing assistant, and advertising capabilities.
The financials behind the platform story
The business results support the narrative. Full year 2025 revenue came in at $6.153 billion, up 24.05% year over year, while gross profit reached $1.593 billion, up 33.87%. ARR crossed $2.05 billion as of Q4 2025, up 26% year over year. CEO Aman Narang has set an ambitious long-term target: “We’re confident we’re building a platform that can serve many multiples of our current locations and scale to $5 billion and $10 billion in ARR over the next decade.”
Enterprise wins are accelerating that path. Toast signed Applebee’s in Q1 2025, its largest enterprise deal in company history, and more recently agreed to roll out across 1,000+ Papa Murphy’s US locations via MTY Food Group. In March 2026, Teriyaki Madness adopted Toast enterprise technology across over 200 US locations.
Stock context
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Despite the operational momentum, the stock has faced pressure. TOST trades at $26.06 as of March 30, 2026, down 26.61% year to date.
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