The 2025 M&A Scorecard: $7+ Billion in Restaurant Tech Deals, and the Buyer Story Has Officially Changed

I spent the first weekend in December on the deal tape — coffee, a yellow pad, the 8-Ks I had bookmarked since spring, and the running tally I keep in a file called restech-2025.csv. The reason I keep that file is simple: every January some sell-side banker is going to send out a “year in review” deck claiming the restaurant tech category did $X billion in transaction value, and I want my own number sitting next to theirs before the deck lands. This year the number is north of seven billion dollars in disclosed value across the deals I can pin to a press release or an SEC filing, and the more interesting fact is the composition of the buyer list.

Here is the contrarian read up front: the popular story about 2025 restaurant tech M&A — that DoorDash spent its way into a platform and everyone else watched — is wrong by half. The other half of the year was a quiet handoff of the category from strategic acquirers to private equity roll-ups and infrastructure consolidators. By December the buyer profile has shifted, and the operators paying attention should be planning around that shift rather than around the marquee logos.

I’ll walk through the scorecard.

The disclosed-value tally

Five deals carry the year. In rough chronological order:

DoorDash / SevenRooms — $1.2 billion, all cash. Announced May 6, 2025 alongside Q1 earnings; closed June 13, 2025 per DoorDash’s subsequent reporting. The strategic logic is CRM and guest data across roughly 13,000 enterprise-skewed venues. PSG, the lead growth investor, exited its minority position at close. (DoorDash IR)

DoorDash / Deliveroo — approximately $3.9 billion, all cash. Announced the same day as the SevenRooms deal; a UK/EMEA delivery footprint paired with Wolt and the legacy US business. Stand-alone, the largest restaurant tech transaction of the year. Combined with SevenRooms, DoorDash committed $5.1 billion in disclosed M&A in a single 24-hour news cycle.

Olo / Thoma Bravo — approximately $2.0 billion, all cash, take-private. Announced in early July at $10.25 per share — a roughly 65% premium to the unaffected price — and closed September 12, 2025. Layoffs followed within days of close. The structural significance of this deal is that the most prominent restaurant-tech SaaS company since the 2021 IPO cycle exited the public markets into a sponsor balance sheet. (Thoma Bravo press release)

Wonder / Grubhub — $650 million. Wonder, the Marc Lore-backed vertically integrated food platform, picked up Grubhub from Just Eat Takeaway at roughly a tenth of the price JET paid in 2021. The deal is not technically a 2025 close — the signing was late 2024 — but the integration work, the platform redirects, and the operational consequences ran through the entire 2025 calendar.

Sweetgreen / Wonder Spyce (kitchen-automation IP, implied ~$186.4M). Reading the proxy and the Q3 disclosures together, Sweetgreen’s accretion of the Spyce robotics IP across 2025 implies a transaction value in the high-$180M range — a number small enough to fly under most year-end deck slides but large enough to matter to the kitchen-automation thesis. I will not pretend this number is as cleanly disclosed as the four above; I am pulling it from the implied accounting and the press cycle. Flag it as my interpretation.

That’s $7.94 billion in confirmed or closely-implied disclosed deal value across five transactions. Add the dozens of sub-$100M tuck-ins that did not break out separately on the buyers’ financials and the directional number is comfortably over eight.

The PitchBook read — circulated this fall via the restaurant tech trade press — was that M&A involving restaurant technology providers rose by 45% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. That number was the talk of the September conference circuit. The H2 prints we now have don’t soften it. They harden it.

The buyer-profile shift, in math

Now the part that the year-end decks will mostly skip. Run the buyer composition.

Of the $7.94B in disclosed value, $5.1B (64%) is DoorDash — a strategic acquirer in the classic sense, a public-market operator buying adjacent capability. So far the story matches the popular reading.

But the next $2.0B (25%) is Thoma Bravo, a private equity sponsor executing a take-private on the most visible public restaurant-tech SaaS issuer in the market. That is not a strategic transaction. It is a balance-sheet transaction. The sponsor’s thesis is roll-up, margin expansion, and an eventual exit at multiple turns above today’s entry — likely back to the public markets in three to five years, possibly into a strategic at a premium. The Olo employee base felt the difference inside of a week.

The remaining $840M (~11%) is split between Wonder — a vertically integrated platform consolidator with a balance sheet that looks more like a tech holdco than a restaurant brand — and a kitchen-automation tuck-in by an operator. Wonder’s buying behavior throughout 2025 has been platform consolidation: Relay couriers, Blue Apron last year, Grubhub this year. The Sweetgreen / Spyce side of the ledger is an operator picking up automation IP, not a strategic buyer acquiring distribution.

In aggregate: roughly 36% of disclosed 2025 deal value was sponsored or platform-consolidator capital, not classical strategic capital. As recently as 2023, that mix was under 10%. The Amex / Tock transaction in 2024 was the inflection — an Amex strategic on the surface, but pricing and structure that read more like a financial allocator’s bet on the reservation-data category than a payments company’s vertical extension.

The implication is straightforward. A category that for a decade was bought primarily by strategics — DoorDash, Toast, NCR, Square, Oracle — has, in the last eighteen months, been bought materially by allocators who underwrite to a different return profile. Strategics underwrite to integration synergies and customer overlap. Sponsors underwrite to LBO math and exit multiples. The two buyer types pay differently, hold differently, and exit differently. The category-wide impact is real.

Where the math gets you on multiples

A digression on multiples, because the deck will hide this number.

SevenRooms at ~$150M ARR and a $1.2B price clears at roughly 8× revenue. Olo at the disclosed run-rate prints in the high single digits as well. Tock to Amex in 2024 was a smaller number on a smaller base but landed in the same neighborhood per-customer. The pattern: enterprise-skewed restaurant SaaS with multi-year contracted revenue has held its price at 7-9× ARR through a year in which the broader SaaS comp set traded at 4-6×. That is the AI-and-data premium showing up in transaction prices — and a forthcoming May Bottom Line will revisit the question of whether brokers can credibly extend that premium down the food chain to operator-level transactions. Spoiler: at the operator tier, the premium is mostly broker patter; at the platform tier, it is a real number with a real LBO model behind it.

The Wonder / Grubhub print is the contrary tell. Grubhub at $650M is a fire-sale multiple — sub-1× revenue on most reasonable estimates — and it confirms that the consumer-facing third-party delivery brand, divorced from a strategic delivery network, is in run-off pricing. The platform value sits with the operator-facing software and data, not the consumer mark. The 2025 deal tape priced both ends of that barbell explicitly.

The sponsor playbook, in three moves

What does it actually mean to have a sponsor buyer in this category? Three things show up reliably in the first ninety days post-close, and Olo’s been a textbook case.

First, OpEx normalization. Sponsors do not run companies at the public-market margin profile. They run them at the LBO margin profile. The Olo headcount action in the week after close was not a surprise to anyone who has seen a Thoma Bravo carve-out before. It was the playbook executing on schedule.

Second, pricing actions on the customer base. Sponsor-owned platforms, especially in mission-critical categories like online ordering and POS-adjacent software, tend to take price within 12-18 months of close. Operators on Olo contracts should be modeling a renewal price increase in their 2026 budgeting cycle. This is not an accusation; it is what the playbook says.

Third, bolt-on M&A funded by the post-close balance sheet. Sponsor portcos in software categories almost always do at least one bolt-on within two years. Watch for Olo to add an adjacent category — guest data, loyalty, payments rails — in 2026. The bolt-on is where the multiple-arbitrage thesis actually plays out.

For operators, the takeaway is to read the vendor’s cap-table change as a signal about future product roadmap and pricing — not as a neutral ownership event.

The DoorDash side of the ledger

I have written separately on the strategic logic of the SevenRooms deal, and an upcoming spring Pass piece will trace the broader DoorDash commerce-platform map. The summary for the scorecard is that DoorDash’s $5.1B in disclosed 2025 M&A is not a marketplace bet. It is a platform bet — guest data, international footprint, in-store ordering, payments. The Bbot acquisition in 2022 was the early signal. The SevenRooms-and-Deliveroo same-day announcement in May 2025 was the confirmation.

DoorDash is buying the operator-facing software stack and the international consumer base simultaneously. That is the playbook of a platform company, not a logistics company. The market took six months to price this correctly — the post-Q1 sell-off into November’s stabilization is on the chart.

What the scorecard says for 2026

Three things to carry into your January planning.

One: the strategic-only era of restaurant tech M&A is over. Sponsors will be the price-setting buyers for SaaS-tier assets in 2026. Operators evaluating vendor relationships should ask, at every renewal, whether the vendor’s ownership is likely to change inside the contract term — and price the answer in.

Two: the AI premium at the platform tier is real and durable. SevenRooms and Olo both cleared 7-9× ARR in a 4-6× SaaS comp environment. The premium is for guest-data assets and contracted enterprise revenue, not for model capability per se. Founders building in this category should plan exit pricing around the data asset, not around the model story.

Three: the consumer-facing delivery brand is in re-pricing. The Grubhub print at $650M is not an outlier. It is the new comp. Standalone consumer marketplaces without operator-side software ride along at depressed multiples; the operator-side software, paired with first-party guest data, is where the value sits.

The seven-plus-billion number will get rounded up in the year-end decks. The buyer story is the part that matters, and the buyer story changed in 2025. Plan accordingly.

— Marcus edits The Bottom Line for TableTransfers. Tips: [email protected].