Toast at Goldman Sachs Communicopia: Strategic Growth and Innovation

On Tuesday, 09 September 2025, Toast Inc. (NYSE:TOST) presented at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025, outlining its strategic priorities and financial performance. The company emphasized its robust growth trajectory, innovation in AI, and international expansion while addressing both opportunities and challenges in its core and emerging markets.

Key Takeaways

• Toast reported a 31% year-over-year gross profit growth in Q2.
• The company is adding over $400 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) yearly.
• Toast’s international markets and new verticals are outperforming expectations.
• The enterprise segment is expanding with significant brands like Dine Brands and Marriott.
• Investments in AI and R&D are central to Toast’s future innovation strategy.

Financial Results

• Gross Profit Growth: Achieved a 31% increase in Q2 year-over-year.
• Margin Goals: Met mid-term margin targets of 30% to 35%.
• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): Surpassed $400 million in the trailing 12 months.
• Net Adds: Recorded 8,500 new locations in Q2.
• New Verticals ARR: Approaching $100 million.
• Fintech Take Rate: Increased by three basis points in Q2.
• Toast Capital Contribution: Expected to add around 10 basis points to the fintech take rate soon.

Operational Updates

• Core SMB Market Penetration: High teens penetration in the U.S. with a total addressable market (TAM) of approximately 600,000 restaurants.
• Flywheel Markets: Over 30% share markets are growing faster than average.
• International Expansion: Launched in Australia; productivity in Canada, UK, and Ireland surpasses U.S. levels from two to three years ago.
• Enterprise Progress: Secured marquee brands like Dine Brands and Marriott with 18-24 months of implementation visibility.
• Food and Beverage Retail: Positive expansion into convenience stores and bottle shops with strong ARPUs.

Future Outlook

• Continued Investment in Core: Focus on dense market investments to enhance flywheel effects.
• R&D Priorities: Expanding TAM through AI-driven innovation, including developing products like Sous Chef and AI-Marketing Assistant.
• International Growth: Balancing current market investments with new opportunities, particularly in Western Europe.
• Enterprise Growth: Building more capabilities to expand with existing enterprise customers.
• Margin Expansion: Aiming for long-term margin goals and managing tariffs through supplier diversification.

Q&A Highlights

• Consumer Spending: Stable and healthy trends observed in restaurant spending.
• Toast Capital: Anticipates continued demand recovery in Q3.
• Product Roadmap: Expanding offerings within the core SMB restaurant business.
• AI Monetization: Prioritizing customer outcomes with AI before monetization.
• Tariff Impacts: Manageable impacts expected due to supplier diversification.

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Interviewer: All right. We are going to kick off here. We’re very excited yet again to have the Toast team here for another fireside chat. You guys have been here every year since the IPO, and we appreciate that, and we’re looking forward to another conversation.

Aman Narang, Toast: Thanks for having us.

Interviewer: Okay. Big picture, Aman, Elena, thank you for doing this. Starting off, you highlighted several key priorities at your Investor Day last year. Scaling in restaurants, expanding into new verticals and geographies, product innovation, driving growth while expanding margins. Looking at the business since then, how do you feel you’ve progressed and kind of what’s left to do?

Aman Narang, Toast: Yeah, I think the business is performing really well. I think first off, you look at the last, what, year and three quarters now, like, really proud of the team’s performance. We’ve had in Q2, year over year, current gross profit growth of 31%. We had talked about margins in the mid-term margin goals in the 30 to 35%. We’ve achieved those. I think we’re now adding north of $400 million in ARR in a year, trailing 12 months, and scaling. Really proud of the team’s performance. I think more importantly, we’re setting the foundations for what we think can drive longer-term durable growth. Some of the new vectors of growth we’ve talked about in retail and international enterprise are performing ahead of plan. In our core business, we continue to do really, really well as well. I think overall, obviously there’s, I like the expression, better, better, never done.

There’s a lot to do still, but overall, I think I’m proud of where we are so far.

Interviewer: Early, I think early, you know, during and post the IPO, there was this sort of TAM saturation argument where, you know, and it hasn’t really played out. The growth has remained very consistent, particularly in the core SMB space. Could you maybe give us some context on where you are on the journey within that core SMB restaurant TAM, and how have your thoughts on terminal levels of penetration evolved over the years as you’ve continued to take share at a pretty rapid clip?

Aman Narang, Toast: Yeah. I think within the U.S. in the SMB, because it’s a constrained TAM, there’s always questions about, you know, TAM saturation in our business just because it’s a very specific TAM that we go after. If you look at the U.S. SMB and mid-market business, we think it’s about 600,000 restaurants. I think our penetration today is in the high teens. Most importantly, the thing that gives me confidence, and we’ve shared this a few times in earnings calls and such in previous forums, is if you look at our markets where we have flywheel status where we’ve got more penetration, or you look at even our most penetrated markets, like the top 10 markets that we’re in, and these are markets with over 30% share. In those markets, on average, in terms of share gains year over year, they’re actually growing faster than the average market.

There’s the question of how do we get more markets into flywheel, but that’s fundamentally what’s giving me and the team confidence that we can continue to invest and continue to grow market share in the U.S. in restaurants.

Interviewer: Yeah. I guess that leads us to how you’re thinking about kind of growth-related investments in the core. You talked about reproductivity being up. It sounds like you’re still adding new flywheel markets. Where do you see opportunities to lean into distribution? Are there certain cities today that are not flywheel markets where you’re really focused on increasing the density?

Aman Narang, Toast: Yeah. Yeah, look, one more data point is productivity year over year is actually up in our business. In Q2, we saw record net adds, like 8,500 net adds in our business, which was a record. We see the same momentum in the back half of the year, continue to accept progress that we’re making. In terms of investments, I think one of the things that the team’s been asking is, if you go look at these markets that are not flywheel, like, why? Some of it is just simply if you go look at where we launched, like Boston, Chicago, Austin, et cetera, those were the earlier markets we had the most penetration in. I think at Investor Day last year, we talked about how 70% of restaurants that open in Austin open on Toast.

We’re trying to figure out how do you get more of these markets to look like that. We’re being surgical about some of these dense markets where we don’t have flywheel share. We’re adding rep capacity to get there faster because we know that’s helpful. We’re investing in marketing. We’ve made really great progress this year in terms of our brand consideration year over year to get top of funnel up. Back to this flywheel, just to remind everyone, as you get more markets in flywheel, you see better top of funnel, you see better conversion, better productivity. Those are the key areas to focus on, go to market. On R&D, in fact, I was talking to a customer last week. This is a seven-location customer in the Boston area. We’re based in Boston. I asked him, why aren’t you on Toast?

He said, we’ve got this, believe it or not, this big first-party delivery business where because they’ve got enough delivery demand for their business, they’ve got lots of first-party drivers and we don’t have the level of support that they need. There’s a specialty POS that they use. In R&D, there’s some work to continue to expand the total addressable market, believe it or not, even 10 years in, there’s continued work that we have to continue to invest in. One thing we’re very focused on on the roadmap is how do we drive more customer-focused innovation. There’s a lot with AI that we’re doing there. As we expand the platform, we’re asking the team to go look at whether customers that use more of our platform, are they happier and stickier?

Lastly, on the CS side, we’re taking a page, maybe this is, I think, Intuit is well known for this, but our customers are not like CTOs and CIOs, they’re not technologists. They need support at times with our platform. In addition to just really good support, we’re looking at what are parts of the platform where a do-it-with-me and a do-it-for-me approach can work. You think about it, all these restaurants, they have to do bookkeeping. There are lots of questions on AI-driven bookkeeping. They have to think about payroll. They have to think about scheduling staff. We’re thinking about what are ways in which we can build more of a do-it-with-me and do-it-for-me approach to help expand the platform as well.

Interviewer: Got it. Okay. Then rounding it out, you’ve continued to see healthy net add growth up every year since the IPO. You’ve talked about continued strength in the core. We’ll pivot to new verticals in a second, but you hit a milestone there of 10,000 locations.

Aman Narang, Toast: Sure.

Interviewer: How do you think about the makeup of net adds between core and newer verticals going forward?

Elena Gomez, Toast: Yeah, I’ll take that. First of all, as Aman said, super proud of the execution and record locations in Q2, around 8,500. Primarily, most of that is from our core business. The momentum we saw in the first half of the year is really why we have confidence that we’re going to add more net adds in 2025 than 2024. We’ve said that all year. We feel really good about that. To the point you made, since the IPO, we’ve been consistent in adding more net adds each year on the platform. That’s on the back of the execution of the team. I feel really good about that. As it relates to these new verticals, really proud of the progress. That’s why we mentioned the 10,000 locations. When you look at the ARR approaching $100 million in ARR, really proud of that execution.

The way we think about that is that will drive growth over the long term. We’ve always said we want to expand the Toast platform and have a much bigger global footprint than we have today. In order to do that, that’s why you’re seeing us lean into these investments. Today, the majority of our business does come from the core.

Interviewer: Great. Okay. Maybe let’s pivot over to the newer verticals, starting with international. Things seem to be trending very well. What are the key investment areas in international across both product and distribution? What are some of the near-term milestones that you’re hoping to achieve there?

Aman Narang, Toast: If you look at the, we launched this business initially in Canada, in the UK, and in Ireland. The progress we’ve seen so far has been really good. Part of that has to do with the platform expansion that we’ve seen. Initially when we started, we just had the core point of sale, and we didn’t have the broader platform. We got a lot of feedback from customers that really what they saw, the value proposition was much stronger as you added more of the platform. What you see as we’ve added more of the platform is rep productivity two years in is actually better in these international markets than it was in the U.S. two years into the business, two or three years into the business. We’re seeing our food continue to grow at a healthy clip, which has been really positive.

If you look at the share of full-serve restaurants, that’s grown to being, if you look at the net adds that would go to the locations that are coming out of the platform, more than 50% of those are now full-serve restaurants. In this business, full-serve restaurants are becoming more complex. We’ve added more of the platform that’s helped expand in full-serve. I think on our payments take rate, we’ve negotiated pricing. As we scale GPV internationally, we’ll get the benefit there until wind of scale. The other thing the team has done, it’s spent a lot of time looking at what are ways in which to build scalable internationalization of our platform. This is things like fiscalization, localization of the platform, and some of the capabilities we need to build out. You look at Australia, we just launched Australia recently.

We’ve got a bunch of customers there now live and scaling there. What was great is we launched with pretty much the same platform that we had in the UK and Canada because of the way the platform has been built. We’ve got a payments partnership that allows us to scale internationally as well. That’s been really positive. That allows the team to focus on the local partnerships that you need to unlock to go into these markets. I think the balance for us is, as we think about international growth, we’ve got to make sure that when we enter these markets, we’ve got to have a path to market leadership over time. We’ve got to invest. We’re also looking at what is the right balance to invest in new markets as well.

You’ll see a good balance there across both scaling in the markets we’re in, but then over the longer term, also expanding. I think we think Western Europe is a really good opportunity in the near term.

Interviewer: Great. Okay. On the enterprise side, kind of keeping with the theme of promises made, promises kept. At the time of the IPO, I think enterprise was considered completely off the table. You guys have had a consistent and steady stream of wins here. One question we get a lot is how to think about the ARPU opportunity here and where that is headed. I’d love to hear your perspective as well and any color you might have on pipelines or your visibility on implementations into next year.

Elena Gomez, Toast: Yeah, happy to talk about that. At first, I would just say we’re really pleased with the progress the team has made. We’ve always said enterprise is a multi-year journey. What you’ve seen is as we’ve invested in enterprise capability, it’s given us a lot more conviction that we can win in the market. You’re seeing that on the back of these deals that we’ve won, whether it’s Dine Brands and other brands that we’ve announced, Marriott as an example. As we’ve invested in these capabilities, we absolutely believe we can have greater share. That’s sort of the meta point. As it relates to ARPU, a couple of things. One is the way we think about the enterprise business is really on a customer-by-customer level as opposed to a per-location level, which does make sense for the SMB business, of course.

If you think of a Dine Brands example, it was one customer with thousands of locations that will onboard over the next 18 to 24 months as an example. That’s one thing. The other thing is when we do these deals, the ARR opportunity is significant. When we look at the payback and LTV to CAC, we take that into consideration. We feel really optimistic and great about where the deals are landing today. As we build more enterprise capabilities, there’s opportunity to expand with those customers as well. We feel really good about that. As it relates to pipeline, what you’re seeing is as we’re landing these customers, our credibility in the enterprise space is only increasing. What we’re seeing is we’re getting pulled into deals that maybe two, three years ago we might have not gotten pulled into.

Having the customer testament against these deals is really helping our pipeline. It also helps with the visibility, right? Because once we land a customer, we have visibility into when those locations are going to go live. Typically, that’s anywhere from between 18 to 24 months.

Aman Narang, Toast: Yeah, right. The only thing I’ll add, Elena, you hit it, is two, three years ago, didn’t have a business. You get these first eight or ten marquee brands, and we’ve gotten those. That’s really been a tailwind in terms of getting just a brand out there. On ARPU, I think one of the areas that if you look at what we do, just like international, we’re very focused on the core operations of the restaurant, the point of sale, and the infrastructure around that. We’re adding some capabilities for drive-through. We don’t have sophisticated guest products at our upmarketing enterprise. That’s an opportunity for us over time.

Interviewer: Okay. Last of the three big expansion verticals, food and beverage retail. Tell me you could give a status update on this. What is resonating the most with clients? Secondarily, you talked at an earnings call about ARPUs already being over $10,000. Can you help frame the opportunity in food and beverage retail for ARPUs longer term?

Aman Narang, Toast: Yeah, you know, food and beverage retail has been a really positive surprise. Surprise is not the right term, but it’s been really positive in terms of the progress we’ve made. We put a dedicated team against it for the first time at the beginning of this year. That team’s productive. The ARPUs, as you mentioned, are healthy. The unit economics of this business are really positive. That’s what’s driving more investment against it. Just for context for everybody, this business actually came because restaurateurs that had hybrid restaurant retail concepts said, "Hey, can you help us with the retail part of the business?" We set up this team. We have a program called New Ventures where we give these teams autonomy to kind of go drive without being burdened by the scale of the business. A small team figured out how to support hybrid restaurant retail.

They came back to us a year later and said, "Actually, a lot of what we’ve had to build here applies in retail more broadly." In convenience stores and bottle shops and gas stations, we’ve seen, as we’ve opened up the dedicated sales team, really, really good progress. Now, if you look at our platform, even in restaurants, it’s not just like a thin sheet of, it’s not a thin layer of software with a lot of payments. Most of the investment in the platform is the core point of sale platform and the infrastructure around it to support it. Even with retail, we’re taking the same very, very vertically focused approach as we are going in. You look at, you know, we’re building out, you know, support for grocery and what that means for inventory across all these segments. We’re, you know, self-checkout in grocery.

We’re building out liquor compliance rules that are needed. We’re building out, you know, capabilities to support deli scales. There’s a lot here to support these verticals and the core point of sale. Zabar’s, by the way, in New York City, I mentioned earnings, and Zabar’s is a good example in New York City of a brand that’s got like 30,000 SKUs. I think they do over 2,500 transactions a day. We’re getting a lot of these brands all over the country that are switching to Toast. These we believe are these lighthouse accounts that others will follow. Many of these accounts are over $10 million in GPV. It’s been really positive. I think the broader platform, another surprise that’s been positive is if you look at the broader platform, like, you know, scheduling and payroll and lending and some of those things just apply out of the box.

There hasn’t been a lot of work to actually get that part of the platform to apply in retail. If you look at the retail ARPUs, you know, it’s over $10,000, which is great. If you look at the investor data, I think we talked about how the initial total addressable market that we see in the U.S. is about 220,000 locations and, you know, $3 million GPV per location. As we scale, we actually think there’s potential to grow that further because we’re just building out the brand right now. Our GPV per location is lower than that $3 million today. Over time, as we grow and scale, I think there’s tremendous upside on that as well.

Interviewer: Awesome. Just zooming out, we’ve talked about the three new verticals. They’re all kind of chugging along, you know, still going strong in core SMB, new verticals picking up steam. We talked about the launch in Australia. You’ve done a lot to expand the TAM already. How do you think about further TAM expansion from here?

Aman Narang, Toast: Yeah, it’s a balancing act. You know, I think if you look at the history of the business for the first 10 years, we said we’re going to focus exclusively on U.S. SMB and mid-market restaurants, not even enterprise. We’re going to focus on this very specific segment of the market, spend a lot of time building out the core and the platform that I think has really been the recipe to being successful because these customers wanted, you know, a purpose-built platform. They wanted all-in-one. They wanted a dedicated support against the whole platform. We want to be careful not to try to dilute that too quickly either. We said, as we’ve expanded into these new verticals, like one North Star that we use in our planning is like anything we enter, we’ve got to have conviction that we have a right to play and win.

If we don’t believe that like ultimately there’s a path to being really successful in it, we should really ask ourselves like why are we in that business to begin with. I also think like there is, you know, we’ve got to look at these market segments and say, just like in SMB restaurants, we, you know, typically our average GPV per location is higher than industry averages. That speaks to the complexity of the platform we’ve built, of the features we support rather. We’re similarly, we’re looking at which segments of the market have great unit economics. That’s another thing that we look at in terms of how we expand. That’s why we chose, you know, initially these key countries in the UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia. We’ve expanded in CBG, in enterprise. We’ve actually seen some interesting growth at the intersection of these.

For example, there’s some grocery stores in the UK that are using Toast. You know, you think about the retail business is also upmarketing enterprise. We’re seeing some inbound interest. Again, it’s early, but it’s interesting to see some of that pull. Enterprise also, there’s international interest. There’s some things at the intersection that we’re seeing. Back to what I said, how we think about TAM expansion is, do we have a right to win? Is the adjacency to our core product there? What is the competitive environment like? Then, you know, can we build a great business here in terms of unit economics and the long-term, you know, potential in terms of what that could drive for, you know, all the core unit economics metrics?

Interviewer: Okay. All right. Pivoting over to investing, the company’s continued to emphasize the investments in the business across both product and go-to-market. At the same time, you’ve still expanded margins really rapidly over the last several years. What are the main investment priorities in the company currently? How do you see that impacting the operating leverage trajectory over the next few years?

Elena Gomez, Toast: Yeah, great question. Overall, our priority around growth and being disciplined in how we grow and driving shareholder value continues to be the priority. It’s the framework we use for all of our investment decisions internally. You heard Aman talk a lot about the opportunity in these emerging markets, but also investing, continuing to invest in the core business is important. As we see this opportunity in these emerging businesses, whether it’s customer signal, the productivity we’re seeing on the ground, there’s a lot that we look at before we make that next investment and expand our total addressable market and all the things. Hopefully what you heard is in his talk track, a lot of discipline every time we make these investment choices.

Zooming out, the one thing we think about is our long-term margins that we announced at Investor Day are still our, you know, we’re still marching towards that. In terms of how we get there, it may not be linear. It’s pretty much in our control because we have this core business. As it’s growing in profitability, it’s really enabling us to invest in these emerging businesses, which we believe will drive long-term growth of the business for many years to come. That’s how we think about it. We’re really optimistic about our ability to drive long-term shareholder value. These businesses we’re investing in really give us, put us in a position to continue on that trajectory.

Interviewer: Elena, we’ll stay with you here on the payment side of the business. People always love to hear the latest in terms of what you’re seeing from a macro perspective. What are your restaurant customers telling you about the state of consumer spending? Have you seen any notable callouts over the last month or so?

Elena Gomez, Toast: Yeah, I would say the first thing that comes to mind is stability. We’re seeing very stable, healthy trends. Q2, obviously, there was some strength in same store sales, but as I look into the quarter, very stable. As we always say, our restaurants are very resilient. If there were any macro turn, we feel like restaurants are very resilient and can handle that. Right now, very stable is what you should hear.

Interviewer: Okay. Okay. On Toast Capital, you called out some demand-related disruptions in the second quarter, presumably relating to the velocity of headlines and the market volatility over the course of the quarter. In the near term, is the expectation that that should just snap back to prior levels? A bigger picture question, do you see a path to Toast Capital contributing more than the current 10 basis points to the fintech take rate?

Elena Gomez, Toast: Yeah, so in terms of the first part of the question, absolutely, we expect the demand to continue to come back. In fact, when we looked at the data, definitely had a slower start in Q2. We think that was more anomalous. As the quarter continued, we saw that demand come back pretty much in line with our expectations. Really feel confident about the program and it’s continued to be healthy as we enter into Q3. 10 basis points is about the right zone for us in the near term. If you zoom out and think about the long-term opportunity, certainly there’s an opportunity for us to grow the program and potentially have it contribute more. In the near term, our focus is being really prudent, managing the program, managing the risk. That’s why we talk about that 10 basis point range as a really good zone.

Interviewer: Great. All right. On the product side, you’ve been expanding wallet share with a number of solutions. I was wondering if you could maybe talk about, you know, it seems like you have a module for everything. What is left to address with the customer experience today?

Aman Narang, Toast: Yeah, we haven’t run out of modules. I think, look, if you look at how long we’ve been in this core point of sale business, it’s like 13 years in restaurants. A lot of these products that are adjacencies are newer, like point of payments, the payroll is five years old. You know, the accounting products are newer. Some of the guest products, we’ve expanded the guest suite dramatically over the past few years. You know, like websites and online ordering is older, but CRM and loyalty and some of the gift card programs and such. Across all these products, if you look at the attach rates and you look at customer feedback, some of these products don’t apply across the entire TAM. That work’s never done.

You know, I still hear on the higher end of the market in our SMB business that there’s some gaps in our payroll product, for example. There’s a lot of investments we’re making to make sure that these products continue to get better and better. I think the thing that gives us a lot of confidence longer term is if you talk to customers, the thing you consistently hear is they would much rather use Toast across the whole platform because it’s just so much easier when it comes to service, when it comes to having a single point of support, when it comes to the interoperability of these solutions. I think there’s still a lot of work back to the modules, just with the existing platform to continue to invest and make them better. I think there’s also a unique opportunity right now with AI.

I’m sure a lot of people are talking to you all about that. Restaurants, a simple example of this, I’ll start with, you know, we talked about benchmarking a couple of years ago. That’s been really positively received by our customers because before they had a tool like this, if you think about how to decide how to price menus or what to put on menus or how to be smart about where to open locations, there wasn’t a lot of data. We take our scale across 150,000 locations and expose that data to customers in a way that they can leverage that to make data-driven decisions. That’s been positive. There’s a lot of manual work in restaurants. You think about, you know, restaurants typically don’t have the time and the capabilities to try to drive their own demand.

We’ve seen some really good early progress with things like our AI-Marketing Assistant that can not only suggest campaigns, but actually create the campaigns across these different channels and show the value of that attributed demand back in terms of, especially if it’s through offers in our platform. We’ve seen some progress there. Even in our products like our retail product with AI, just being able to get SKUs onto the shelf faster or online faster by using AI to describe the different products and create images through a central repository that we have has been really positively received. I think there’s a lot on the AI front in terms of just data. There’s also, you know, lots of manual workflows in restaurants. You think about voice, for example, like picking up the phone, drive-through. There’s a lot of work going on in restaurants right now.

Even just terminals, if you think about walking up to a terminal, I think it’s only a matter of time before you’re going to be able to talk to a voice AI to place the order because it’s a very constrained use case. There’s some work there that we’re doing and getting some early feedback from customers. I think in AI, there’s a bunch of opportunity. We’re building Sous Chef. We talked about Sous Chef, I think, Investor Day. In the vision there, the simplest way to think about it is we want to build the world’s best GPT for restaurants. In fact, I was talking to one of our customers, another one of our customers, this is in Evanston, Illinois. I was asking him like how things are going. He brought up like Sous Chef’s still in beta, but he said it’s really positive. I asked him why.

He said, like, you know, it’s hard to analyze the data in our business. They wanted to understand what is happening year over year over the past three years, but they wanted to take out some of these pop-ups they have got on the weekends and Fridays and Saturdays. I went to Sous Chef and said, analyze the data, but take out these pop-up events as marked this way. It did it. In the past, without it, it would have had to export all the data to Excel and create like a pivot table. Just simplifying all of that, a lot of that has been a big win because these restaurateurs are not often doing the time and the energy to do all that themselves.

I think one of the other areas that we’re thinking a lot about as part of this, like the American Express partnership we announced at the last earnings call, is how do we take the data about the guest to create a personalized experience for the diner at the table. When you think about Toast, like across 150,000 customers, we know what people like, items, drinks, we know allergies, we know what their taste profiles are. How do you create a more personalized experience at the table? That’s an area we’re really looking at very carefully as part of what the American Express partnership is about. The last thing I think, and this is a little bit further out, if you think about it, restaurants are one of the few categories where there’s no demand-supply matching happening.

One of the things we’re thinking about in our marketing tools is how do we think more intelligently about the peak times and the slower times to better help restaurants optimize yield. That’s a team focus on that as well. I think there’s a lot on the innovation front that we’re leaning into. Obviously, not everything here is going to work that I just talked about, but the approach we use is the test and iterate and learn approach and see where we see the right signals. There’s a lot we’re doing to expand the surface area of what we offer within the core SMB restaurant business.

Interviewer: You gave a very tangible example of the AI platform saving your customers’ time and energy. How do you think about the critical mass of AI-driven products where you can begin to think about monetization?

Aman Narang, Toast: Yeah, I think it’s early. I mean, I think we are very focused on whether it’s internally with our own teams or with customers. The mantra we use is it’s got to be customer-focused innovation that’s driving outcomes and impact. I think we can all get caught up in all the hype of AI too. We’re very careful to say what are the things that matter to our end customers, to our teams. Whether it’s the voice AI example that I gave or Sous Chef, which is our GPT that we want to build, a lot of the energy is focused on can we create the right outcomes and right value for customers. I think the monetization will follow.

I think it’s very clear that if you’ve got tools that can help you with automation on some of the manual work they have in restaurants, they really struggle with labor and turnover in restaurants is very high. On the data side, if you can make them smarter, whether it’s about making better, more intelligent decisions about their menu or about their pricing or about how to think about demand, those are the types of things where I think as we can do those things, the monetization will follow. The focus and energy right now is the customer outcomes of AI.

Interviewer: Okay. Let’s talk on a little bit of the continued conversation around monetization. Pricing has been an ongoing conversation for the last few years. I think your message has been pretty consistent, saying you’re not looking for step function changes in prices across the board. If we fast forward to today, we’ve seen very consistent SaaS ARPU growth. A lot of that has been driven by adoption. We’ve seen a modest amount of take-rate expansion at Toast Capital, but not huge. How are you thinking about the current levels of ARPU expansion kind of across the board? Then, you know, price as a lever, kind of where are you in that journey?

Elena Gomez, Toast: Yeah, great question. First, the way you characterize it is right on. Really very targeted pricing moves and you won’t ever see a step change. I think that still continues to be our focus. The underlying principle is really, as long as we continue to drive customer outcomes, some of the things that Aman even said, the monetization follows. That puts us in a position where if we want to monetize, whether it’s SaaS or fintech, we have that opportunity to do that. We’ll do it as small, steady movements in our price as kind of normal course of business as opposed to a one-time massive price change. I think that’s a really important principle. When you look at the fintech side, the take rate up three basis points in Q2. As we all know, take rate is really a function of many variables. Pricing is just one of them.

Cost optimization continues to be something we’re looking at, looking at every transaction, the cost per transaction. Even innovation that can drive our take rate, surcharging is a good example of a product that was added that added a little bit of movement on take rate. Over time, obviously, that’ll add more. What you should hear is pricing is a small element of that because there’s just so many puts and takes to take rate. That’s something we believe over the long term, we can certainly improve take rate. On the SaaS side, you know, being in mid-singles is a good zone for the near term. If you just hear even what Aman just talked about in terms of AI and the opportunity to monetize that, and then you think about the breadth of the platform, I think you said we have, I don’t know how many modules.

If you just think about the breadth of the platform and the opportunity to drive attach over time, plus the innovation that’s coming, we feel we have a ton of conviction and the upsell team is still relatively new. We have a ton of opportunity over the long term to really move ARPU, a long-term ARPU. Across both sides, whether it’s the SaaS side or fintech side, we have confidence we can move both of them.

Interviewer: Great. On last quarter’s earnings call, you talked about expecting to see the impacts of tariffs come through on the hardware side. Can you expand a bit on what you’re seeing and what you expect the second half and into 2026 as some of that higher cost inventory starts to work its way through the numbers?

Elena Gomez, Toast: Yeah, it’s a great question. First of all, it’s a super dynamic environment, and we’re paying close attention. I think what you should hear is very manageable in terms of how we see the landscape both in 2025 and 2026. We set a strategy several years ago to sort of move away from China. Since then, some of the tariffs have expanded to other countries. Obviously, we’re monitoring that. We feel very confident that, again, it’s manageable because of the timing of when inventory comes in and then ultimately when it gets into customers’ hands. That does have an impact where you will not see as big of an impact in 2025, and then you’ll have the full year impact in 2026. All in, we feel very confident we can manage it.

Interviewer: Very good. Last question here on capital allocation. You’ve done some bolt-on acquisitions historically, things like Extra Chef. What’s your appetite for M&A today? If you could just talk about where the bar is relative to history on pulling that lever.

Elena Gomez, Toast: Yeah, sure. We have a really clear framework on capital allocation. It starts with let’s invest in our core business and that’s what we’re really good at. As we continue to drive that profitability in the core, it allows us to invest in these longer-term opportunities, international, enterprise, et cetera. These are all opportunities that we see signal to drive that long-term growth. Opportunistically, of course, we’re canvassing the market for opportunity in the M&A landscape. The hurdle’s high. We’ve always said that it’s been really high for us because we’ve got such a great execution machine in our core business that we want to make sure we don’t disrupt that. Things we’re looking for are, you know, do the economics make sense? Is it a natural adjacency to our core strategy? Will it accelerate time to market? The normal things. As well as culturally, is it a fit?

There’s a hurdle and a set of criteria we look at. Yes, it’s an opportunity, but again, the hurdle’s high.

Interviewer: Very good. I think with that, we’re just about out of time. Thank you so much for joining us again. Really enjoyed talking to you.

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