Article on CNBC Apr 2020 on Toast
- Toast was valued at almost $5 billion in February, coming off a year of 109% revenue growth.
- A month later, states from California to New York had imposed shelter-in-place rules, forcing restaurants to close except for takeout and delivery.
- Toast is using a chunk of the $400 million it just raised to provide free services to new and existing customers.
When the calendar turned to 2020, Toast was one of the hottest names in technology. Shares of the privately held company, which makes software for restaurants, were in high demand on the secondary markets. Existing investors led a $400 million financing round in mid-February at an almost $5 billion, close to double where it was a year earlier.
Then the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S., and many of Toast’s customers had to shut their doors. Suddenly, the eight-year-old cloud software business, which had blossomed as restaurants rushed to modernize their tech systems, found itself in the teeth of an economic crisis and facing the prospect of evaporating revenue.
Read the full Article on CNBC Apr 2020
