Who owns Toast? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Toast is one of the most recognizable names in restaurant technology, powering the tablets, terminals, and payment systems inside roughly 164,000 restaurant locations. Its ownership is more layered than the simple ticker suggests. The company is publicly traded, yet its founders and earliest investors still hold the levers of control through a share class built for exactly that purpose.

The story of who owns Toast runs through three engineers who left a search-software company, a decade of venture funding, and a 2021 IPO that turned all three founders into billionaires on paper. Today the economic ownership is spread across index funds and large asset managers, while voting power sits with the people who built the business.

Understanding that split between economics and control is the key to reading Toast's cap table. It explains why a company most investors can buy on any brokerage app is still, in the ways that matter for governance, run by its founders.

Toast, Inc. was founded in 2011 in Boston, Massachusetts, by Steve Fredette, Aman Narang, and Jonathan Grimm. The three met at Endeca, a Cambridge search-software company that Oracle acquired in 2011 for about $1 billion. They first tried to build a consumer mobile-payment app, then pivoted to a cloud-based point-of-sale system when they saw how little modern software the restaurant industry ran on.

The company is headquartered in Boston. Its core product is an all-in-one platform for restaurants that combines point-of-sale hardware, payment processing, online ordering, delivery, payroll, and lending. Toast makes most of its money from payment processing and subscription software rather than from selling terminals, which aligns its revenue with the transaction volume flowing through its customers.

Toast is profitable and growing. For full-year 2025 the company reported revenue of $6.15 billion, up 24% year over year, and GAAP net income of $342 million, up sharply from $19 million in 2024. Annual recurring revenue passed $2.0 billion, gross payment volume reached $51.4 billion, and total locations grew 22% to roughly 164,000. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $633 million.

Toast is publicly held. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange on September 22, 2021, under the ticker TOST, and trades there today. It has no parent company and is not a subsidiary of any larger group. Anyone can buy Class A shares on the open market, but as the sections below explain, buying shares does not buy proportional voting power, because Toast runs a dual-class structure that keeps control with its pre-IPO owners.

Toast's three founders, Steve Fredette, Aman Narang, and Jonathan Grimm, each held stakes worth more than $1 billion at the time of the 2021 IPO. Their direct economic ownership has fallen since then through routine share sales and the dilution that comes with being a large public company, and public filings show their individual Class A economic stakes are now modest single-digit percentages or lower. Their influence, however, runs through Class B shares that carry ten votes each, which preserves outsized voting control even as their share of the economics has shrunk. Because insiders sell shares over time and holdings shift, exact founder percentages should be read as point-in-time figures rather than fixed stakes.

Toast raised roughly $902 million in private funding across several rounds before going public. The largest disclosed rounds are its 2019 Series E and 2020 Series F, followed by the 2021 IPO. Earlier Series A through D rounds, led at various points by Bessemer Venture Partners and other backers, are not all individually disclosed, so the first row below aggregates them.

Since the IPO, ownership of Toast's economics has shifted toward large asset managers and index funds. The Vanguard Group is among the largest holders, with a stake reported in the tens of millions of shares. BlackRock is another top institutional holder. Capital International Investors, part of the Capital Group, and FMR LLC, the parent of Fidelity, also rank among the biggest backers, alongside firms such as Jennison Associates, Morgan Stanley, State Street, and T. Rowe Price. Estimates from ownership trackers put total institutional ownership at roughly three-quarters of shares outstanding, with insiders holding high-single-digit percentages and retail investors the remainder. These aggregator figures vary by source and date, so treat them as approximate.

Several of these names, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Tiger Global Management, TCV, TPG, and T. Rowe Price, backed Toast as a private company and carried their positions into the public market. That continuity from venture investor to public shareholder is common for recent technology IPOs.

Toast has two classes of common stock. Class A shares, the ones that trade publicly, carry one vote each. Class B shares carry ten votes each and are held by pre-IPO stockholders, including the founders, directors, and early investors. As of February 12, 2026, Toast had about 524 million Class A shares and 65 million Class B shares outstanding. Because of the ten-to-one voting ratio, holders of Class B stock can control a majority of the combined voting power. That structure is set to persist until the holders of two-thirds of the Class B shares elect to convert them, or until September 24, 2028, whichever comes first, when the super-voting shares are scheduled to sunset. Toast's market capitalization was about $19.6 billion as of September 4, 2026. Because that number moves with the share price, pinning down a company's worth on any given day is closer to reading a live market-cap figure than a fixed valuation.

Aman Narang is Toast's chief executive officer, a role he has held since January 1, 2024. He is a co-founder and previously served as co-president from 2012 and as chief operating officer from 2021. He took over from Chris Comparato, who was CEO from 2015 through the end of 2023 and stayed on the board before departing in 2025. Narang's return to the top job put a founder back in charge of day-to-day strategy.

Steve Fredette and Jonathan Grimm, the other two co-founders, remain associated with the company and hold Class B shares. Mark Hawkins, the former lead independent director, became chairperson of the board on January 1, 2024. The board also includes representatives with roots in Toast's venture-backed years, reflecting the investors who financed its growth.

The practical point about control is the dual-class structure. Even though public shareholders own most of the economics, the founders and other pre-IPO holders retain the voting power to steer major corporate decisions until the Class B shares convert or sunset. Any description of specific director stakes should be treated as point-in-time, because insider holdings change through sales and equity grants.

In mid-2023 Toast added a 99-cent processing fee to online orders of $10 or more placed through its digital ordering channels, a charge passed to diners rather than restaurants. The move drew fast and public criticism from restaurant operators who said Toast was charging their customers without giving them a way to waive it. Toast reversed course within days, removing the fee by late July 2023. Then-CEO Chris Comparato said the company had made the wrong decision. The episode showed how sensitive Toast's pricing is to the restaurants it depends on, and it preceded the leadership transition announced later that year.

Toast's dual-class structure concentrates voting power with pre-IPO holders, which limits the influence of ordinary Class A shareholders on governance matters. This is legal and common among recent technology listings, but it is a recognized governance risk. Public investors own most of the economics while holding a minority of the votes until the Class B shares convert or reach their scheduled sunset. The kinds of governance and market exposures a structure like this creates are the sort of items a risk register template is designed to track.

Toast operates in a crowded payments and point-of-sale market that includes Square, owned by Block, along with Clover, Shift4, SpotOn, and Lightspeed. Restaurants watch processing fees and contract terms closely, and Toast has faced scrutiny over the total cost of its bundled hardware, software, and payment services. A useful contrast is how Block controls Square, which pairs its own founder-led voting structure with a similar payments business. Pricing disputes and competitive switching are ongoing business risks rather than one-time events.

Toast's ownership structure is a deliberate answer to a common founder question: how to raise large amounts of public capital without giving up control. By listing Class A shares while keeping super-voting Class B stock, the founders financed the company's growth on public markets yet retained the power to set its direction. That arrangement lets management pursue long-term bets, such as expanding into payroll, lending, and enterprise restaurant chains, without the immediate threat of an activist campaign or a hostile takeover.

For public investors, the trade-off is real. Buying TOST shares buys a claim on Toast's profits and growth, but not a proportional say in how the company is run. That matters most in moments of stress or strategic disagreement, when a normal shareholder base could push for change and Toast's cannot until the Class B shares sunset. The payments-heavy revenue model also ties Toast's fortunes to restaurant spending, which is why comparisons to other fintech platforms like how PayPal makes money and how Klarna makes money are useful for gauging where its margins can go.

For the founders and early investors, the structure preserves the value of years of building. Venture backers such as Bessemer and Tiger Global converted private stakes into public liquidity, while the founders kept enough voting weight to guide the company they started. The scheduled 2028 sunset means this concentrated control is temporary by design, which sets a clock on the current governance setup.

For restaurants and diners, the ownership picture is mostly indirect but not irrelevant. A founder-led company can move quickly, as the fast reversal of the 99-cent fee showed, but concentrated control also means fewer external checks on decisions that affect pricing and product. How Toast balances shareholder returns against the interests of the restaurants on its platform will shape the relationship for years.

Aman Narang is the CEO of Toast, a role he has held since January 1, 2024. He is a co-founder of the company and previously served as co-president and chief operating officer. He succeeded Chris Comparato, who led Toast from 2015 through the end of 2023.

Yes. Toast, Inc. trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker TOST. It went public on September 22, 2021, at $40 per share, an implied valuation of about $20 billion, and shares closed up 56% on their first day.

Steve Fredette, Aman Narang, and Jonathan Grimm founded Toast in 2011 in Boston. The three met while working at Endeca, a search-software company acquired by Oracle, and built Toast into a cloud-based restaurant point-of-sale and payments platform.

By economic ownership, the largest holders are institutional investors, including The Vanguard Group, BlackRock, the Capital Group, and Fidelity (FMR). By voting power, the founders and other pre-IPO holders retain control through Class B shares that carry ten votes each. Ownership-tracker figures vary by source and date.

Toast raised roughly $902 million in venture funding before its IPO, including a $250 million Series E in 2019 and a $400 million Series F in 2020, then about $870 million in its 2021 public offering. Its market capitalization was about $19.6 billion as of September 4, 2026, down from the roughly $31 billion it reached at the close of its first trading day.