Toast Q4: 30,000 net new locations, and Aman Narang names his AI moat

Thursday, 5:14 p.m. Eastern, the call still on speaker, marker in hand on the press release. The AI wires were running the same headline by the time Elena Gomez finished prepared remarks: “Toast IQ adoption tops 50%.” Wrong lead. The right lead is the number Gomez said two minutes earlier and that nobody on Twitter is quoting: thirty thousand.

Toast added a record thirty thousand net new locations in 2025, closing the year at 164,000 (+22%). ARR crossed two billion dollars for the first time, up 26%. And on the same call, CEO Aman Narang confirmed what’s been a rumor since the Delphi acquisition two years ago: Toast is launching a drive-thru product this year. That is the print. It is a maturing-platform print. It is not an AI re-rating.

The number nobody’s quoting

Start with the location math. Thirty thousand net adds in a single year, roughly eight thousand of those in Q4, is not a software-multiple story. It’s a distribution story. Toast added more restaurants to its platform in 2025 than most of its competitors have ever signed. The bull case has always been that the install base compounds faster than take-rate pressure can erode it. The 2025 cohort says that’s still true.

The composition under the headline is what Oliver Grant walked through in his pre-earnings note on February 6 — fintech still growing faster than software, ARR mix not bending the way the sell side wants, free cash flow real and growing. Oliver wrote it as a setup call. The print mostly confirmed it. The platform is just getting bigger. That’s a fine outcome. It’s not the AI outcome the sell side spent two weeks pricing in.

What Narang actually said about AI

The line everyone’s going to clip, and the one I’m clipping too, from Narang in prepared remarks: “I look at AI as an opportunity for Toast to lean in and drive innovation and impact for our customers and versus being a risk to the business.”

Read that twice. He’s not saying AI will lift Toast’s multiple. He’s saying AI is not going to kill Toast. That’s defensive framing dressed up in offensive language, and it’s the exact framing Oliver flagged last week. The CEO is telling you the moat is the platform, not the model.

The Toast IQ numbers Gomez disclosed are real. Over half of Toast’s locations have used Toast IQ; the product has handled more than eight million queries since launch, and Narang said “tens and thousands of locations” — sic — are using it weekly. That’s a credible adoption curve fifteen months after the pilot Olivia covered in Sous Chef-to-Toast IQ. It is not a disclosed dollar contribution to ARR. Oliver asked for that line. He didn’t get it. Neither did anyone else on the Q&A. If Toast IQ were already earning the company its software multiple, management would tell you what it’s earning. They didn’t. So it isn’t. Yet.

The actual news: drive-thru

Buried after the AI commentary the wires were chasing was the line that will matter more in eighteen months. From Narang: “We’re planning to launch our drive-thru product this year, which is going to open up that market in a much bigger way than has been available historically.”

This is the first time Toast has publicly committed to a drive-thru launch timeline. It’s been telegraphed since 2023, when Toast bought Delphi Display Systems for the drive-thru hardware stack. Restaurant Business confirmed Friday morning the product will handle multi-lane configurations and may incorporate AI voice ordering — the connective tissue between the Toast IQ adoption number and the drive-thru news. The wins so far, Narang said, have been in casual and sit-down. Drive-thru is the largest sales channel in fast food and the one segment where Toast has been structurally locked out.

If Toast IQ is the layer, drive-thru is the wedge that lets the layer matter at QSR scale. The 2026 story is whether those two pieces ship in the same product cycle.

What the 2026 guide is telling you

Gomez guided 2026 adjusted EBITDA to $775M-$795M against $633M in 2025 — a 34% margin on the print and roughly a 23% step-up next year. She also guided recurring gross profit growth of 20% to 22%, a deceleration from 33% in 2025 and the one number on the call that should make bulls nervous. A platform compounding at a 20% recurring-gross-profit clip is a healthy SaaS-adjacent business. It is not a 30x-revenue business. The guide is consistent with the rest of the print: maturing platform. For where it sits operationally, Tomás Reyes wrote the May desk review you’ll want next to this one.

The Pass take

The sell-side reflex on a print like this is to call it “in line” and move on. That’s wrong twice. It’s wrong because thirty thousand net new locations and a $2B ARR milestone in the same year is not “in line” — it’s the best year in company history on the metric that defines Toast’s moat. And it’s wrong because the AI premium the buy side has been trying to attach to this name is visibly absent from management’s own framing. Narang gave the bulls one sentence on AI as opportunity. He gave them four on drive-thru. That’s the tell.

Two things into Q1. First, whether Toast IQ gets a disclosed ARR line next quarter — Oliver’s number to beat is $150M, and I’d bet under. Second, whether drive-thru ships with a named pilot partner. The first QSR logo Toast names on drive-thru will tell us more about 2027 than anything in today’s print.

The AI press wanted Toast IQ to be the story. The numbers say Toast is still adding restaurants faster than anyone else in the category, and is finally walking through the one door it hadn’t walked through. That’s a maturing platform. That’s a good print. That’s not a re-rating.

— Maya covers restaurant tech for The Pass. Tips: [email protected].