Dive Brief:

• Point-of-sale service provider Toast has long been known for working with restaurants, but is starting to make headway with entertainment venue clients, an executive said in a recent earnings call.
• In the first quarter the company signed Topgolf, a Dallas-based chain of driving ranges, Toast CEO Aman Narang said in the May 8 call with investors.
• “We're accelerating growth in new geographies and new verticals,” he said.

Dive Insight:

Toast, which is based in Boston, will specifically provide Topgolf with handheld point-of-sale card readers that employees can bring to customers so they don’t need to leave the driving range to pay for food or beverages from Topgolf’s kitchen and bars, Narang said.

“Topgolf is a customer that really speaks to the versatility” of Toast, Narang said.

The digital processor has also pushed to add venues such as bowling alleys, movie theaters and arcades, a Toast spokesperson said in an email, although the spokesperson did not provide a timeline for those signings or provide any specific names.

The move into entertainment comes as Toast is making a push to attract retailers such as convenience stores, bottle shops and grocery stores.

The point-of-sale company expects to add “10,000 new locations across international food and beverage, retail and enterprise in 2025,” Narang said.

Toast’s major competitors in the restaurant space include Fiserv’s Clover, along with industry heavyweights Micros — which is owned by Oracle — and NCR Voyix.

Analysts were generally upbeat about Toast’s campaign to branch out into different sectors of the economy.

“While still early in the process of taking price and diversifying its total addressable market (TAM) within enterprise, international, and retail verticals, Toast appears to be executing on growth initiatives while navigating an uncertain macro environment,” Stephens analyst Charles Nabhan wrote in a May 9 note to investors.

Toast also signed Applebee’s in the quarter, a deal that UBS analyst Timothy Chiodo described as the company’s “largest deal to date” in a May 9 note to investors.

Toast reported $56 million in net income for the quarter, compared to a loss of $83 million in the first quarter of 2024.

The company also reported $1.34 billion in revenue for the quarter, a 24% increase over the 1.08 billion in revenue that Toast reported in the year-ago quarter.