Toast Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
August 4, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Q2 exceeded expectations, with recurring gross profit streams up 28%, GAAP operating margin reaching 26%, adjusted EBITDA increasing 38% to $221 million, and record net additions of 9,500 locations.
  • Positive Sentiment: Toast raised its full-year 2026 outlook to 23%–25% growth in recurring gross profit and adjusted EBITDA of $805 million–$825 million, while maintaining a strategy of sustained growth and gradual margin expansion.
  • Positive Sentiment: The company reported strong early traction for Toast IQ Grow, its AI marketing agent, which is on track to reach $10 million in ARR faster than any prior product and could expand monetization into payroll, scheduling, bookkeeping, tax, and other services.
  • Positive Sentiment: Toast is gaining momentum beyond its core restaurant market across enterprise, international, and retail, with new customers including Best Western and TGI Fridays U.K.; ARR in these new markets is expected to nearly double to $200 million this year.
  • Negative Sentiment: Free cash flow declined year over year to $130 million due to higher hardware inventory, while memory-cost pressures are expected to have a greater P&L impact in 2027 despite supply-chain mitigation efforts and a roughly $10 million tariff refund in Q2.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Toast Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

Transcript Sections

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Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Kristalyn, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Toast's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Today's call will be 45 minutes. I will now turn the call over to Michael Senno, Senior Vice President of Finance. You may begin your conference.

Michael Senno
Michael Senno
SVP of Finance at Toast

Thank you. Welcome to Toast's second quarter 2026 earnings call. Toast's CEO, Aman Narang, and CFO, Elena Gomez, will open with prepared remarks, followed by Q&A. Before we start, I'd like to remind everyone that today's call may include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties and reflect our views and assumptions only as of today. These forward-looking statements include expectations around financial and operational metrics, products, business and investment strategy, and guidance. Actual results may vary significantly, we expressly disclaim any obligation to update the forward-looking statements made today. For a detailed discussion of risks, please refer to the cautionary language in today's press release and our SEC filings.

Michael Senno
Michael Senno
SVP of Finance at Toast

During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, including, but not limited to, non-GAAP subscription services gross profit and non-GAAP financial technology solutions gross profit, which we refer to collectively as our recurring gross profit streams. These are the basis for our top-line guidance. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. Please refer to our earnings release and SEC filings for detailed reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures. Unless otherwise stated, all references on this call to cost of revenue, gross profit and gross margin, sales and marketing expense, research and development expense, and general and administrative expense are on a non-GAAP basis. With that, let me turn the call over to Aman.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Thanks, Michael, thank you all for joining us today. We had another great quarter. In Q2, we grew recurring gross profit streams over 28% and expanded GAAP operating income margins to 26%. We had a record 9,500 net location adds in the quarter, 1,000 more than our previous high watermark. Our core business continues to scale, our new markets are growing rapidly, we're reinventing our platform with AI to agents and software, working together to drive real business outcomes for customers. For example, Toast IQ Grow, our marketing agent, is the fastest-growing product we have ever launched, and it's giving us more conviction in our AI opportunities and its potential to scale ARR over time. I'm so thankful for our incredible Toast team, who continue to execute and deliver at a very high level.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

We're excited to announce a number of notable new customers to Toast across the different market segments we serve. In our core business, we welcome Kung Fu Tea, a brand with over 300 locations. In enterprise, we're thrilled to become an endorsed provider by leading hospitality brand Best Western to continue our momentum across hotels. Internationally, we expanded our relationship with TGI Fridays in the U.K. In addition to this momentum across our restaurant segments, in retail, we continue to see really strong traction, including our very first gas stations, where we're processing fuel payments for the very first time. We've had a great first half, and our top priorities heading into the back half of 2026 remain unchanged. Number one, expand what Toast can do for customers with AI, from software to an agentic platform that takes on critical work and delivers business outcomes for customers.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Number two, expand the markets we serve. Lastly, reinvent how we work with AI to accelerate our most important goals and drive durable growth. We are well-positioned as a vertically integrated platform across software, hardware, payments, and lending. Customers recognize the role we play as the most important technology partner and are looking to us to help them take advantage of the opportunity AI creates. I continue to believe executing against these priorities sets us up to scale Toast to $10 billion in ARR and beyond. Okay, let's jump into the priorities. Number one, expand what Toast can do for customers. Toast has spent 14 years evolving from a point-of-sale system to a system of record, software that helps restaurants manage their operations, staff, guests, and suppliers.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Many of our customers don't have the time to leverage everything Toast offers and end up outsourcing important functions such as marketing, payroll, and bookkeeping. With AI, we are showing that we can take on some of that work and do it even better. Digital marketing is the first agentic workload we launched, and we have seen tremendous success thus far. In fact, Toast IQ Grow is on track to become the fastest-growing product to $10 million in ARR. The early customer reception reinforces that we're solving a real problem and have a large opportunity to monetize our AI offerings. Toast IQ Grow brings together the tools and capabilities to improve a customer's website, SEO, digital ordering, and social presence, leveraging the customer's data to build effective marketing campaigns that drive better guest conversion. I'll give you an example.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Spirits Food & Friends is a family-owned restaurant in Louisiana that started with Toast in 2025, consolidating more than 10 disparate systems onto a single platform across POS, payroll, scheduling, and more. Now they're using Toast IQ Grow to power their marketing. For the first time ever, they're segmenting marketing campaigns using their data and are able to connect these campaigns directly to sales. As a result, they have not only cut their monthly agency spend by 70%, they've also generated over $100,000 in marketing-attributed sales in just under two months. We are uniquely positioned to bring the benefits of Toast IQ Grow to restaurants across our platform. We can optimize the full revenue cycle, the digital presence that gets restaurants discovered, drives orders, and reaches new guests through customized advertising. The point-of-sale system that captures transactions in-store and online, and the multi-channel marketing engine that brings guests back.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Fueled by transaction data, we know what guests ordered, how often they return, and when they stop coming back. We know the restaurants too, the sales trends, the slow nights, and the overall capacity. Toast IQ Grow will use all of that to drive guests back across email, text, push notifications, and social, moving us towards personalized, one-on-one marketing at scale. Because we power the point-of-sale, we can close the loop with each campaign tied directly to the orders it drives. As you can see, our success with Toast IQ Grow comes out of two things, data and context. That is the foundation of our Toast IQ ecosystem. First on data. As a customer's system of record, Toast understands how it operates. Sales, guest preferences, scheduling, order flow, and menu changes are recorded as they happen. Data alone isn't the advantage.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

The context from that data and knowing how to read it is. Over 14 years, we've watched good and bad operators run their businesses long enough to learn what they do and how the best ones think and adapt. We know what a smart menu change looks like versus a bad one. When a staffing pattern signals trouble, and which pricing moves hold up in a given market. Over time, we plan to build on Toast IQ Grow and roll out a series of agentic products on top of our software platform using our data and context advantage. This opens up a market opportunity beyond software. Marketing, scheduling and payroll, and bookkeeping and tax are services restaurants often pay for today. In many cases, they're spending a multiple of what they spend on software. Longer term, imagine a series of agents across these services.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Working in concert, they'll be able to build a restaurant's projected demand, look at food cost and availability, labor schedules, and projected guest patterns to drive suggestions that improve profitability. That's an incredibly exciting future, especially in an industry known for slim margins and long hours. Okay. Let's shift gears now to our second priority, which is to expand the markets we serve. In our core business, our sales team continues to drive strong win rates. We're gaining GPV share faster than any other major provider in our space. Kung Fu Tea is a great example of a growing brand that chose Toast because they saw us as a leader and an innovative partner that will help them invest in automation and surface actionable intelligence to keep them a step ahead.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Across our new TAMs, enterprise, international, and retail, the vertical playbook that built our restaurant business, product depth, operational expertise, and local go-to-market, is working just as well. In fact, ARR in each of the new TAMs is both larger than the core was and scaling faster than the core did at the same stage of maturity. Internationally, we expanded our partnership with TGI Fridays, the U.K. They are one of dozens of customers that have locations with us across multiple countries now. These operators tend to be in the largest global cities around the world, where average restaurant sales are higher, which is best aligned with our value proposition. As we expand Toast to more of these Tier 1 markets, I'm confident we can continue to drive durable growth with strong payback periods.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

In enterprise, we have momentum across the market in restaurants, hotels, as well as sports and entertainment venues. We're excited to become an endorsed food and beverage vendor for Best Western, giving us the opportunity to go after the thousands of hotel restaurants they have across the U.S. and Canada. Sports and entertainment is a large TAM in the enterprise space, estimated to be a $500 million ARR opportunity in the U.S. alone. These customers across stadiums and corporate dining environments like schools, museums, and theme parks, represent an adjacent market to the traditional restaurant TAM we serve, and we have roughly doubled our location count in this market over the past year. It's brands such as VenuWorks, whose portfolio of arenas and stadiums include the Ford Center, which runs on Toast, or Alaskan tour company, Allen Marine Tours, running our Toast Go three devices on their excursion vessels.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Shifting gears to retail. We continue to see great progress here as well with ARPU that are closest to our core business. We have doubled our retail sales capacity over the last year, and we expect that to continue to scale to meet the market opportunity we see. Today, we're primarily targeting grocery, convenience stores, and bottle shops. Grocery remains a priority for us given that this part of the market has particularly attractive GPV and ARPU. We also recently launched fuel payments, bringing our first few gas stations convenience stores onto the platform, a large opportunity for us over time. We're also testing into other parts of the broader retail TAM, and will expand further where we see product market fit.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Internally, we talk a lot about how Toast emerged as a leading provider for restaurants over the past decade, and how we have a broader opportunity to not just scale within restaurants, but support local businesses of all types with our platform. Over time, you should expect to see us launch in more sub-verticals, just as we have within grocery, convenience stores, and bottle shops. To wrap it up, our third priority is to reinvent how we work, scale with AI, and invest in durable growth. We are delivering world-class growth and margins at scale. The results of decisions we've made over time to lean into growth opportunities while simultaneously driving efficiency across the business. Our core growth algorithm continues to deliver great results. We're gaining market share, increasing ARPU, and our new AI offerings open up more opportunities to scale ARR over time.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

The margins in our core business are already over 40%, and we expect the margin to continue to scale and be meaningfully higher longer-term. In our new TAMs, we're scaling quickly, and on a path to nearly double ARR to $200 million this year. Given the strong market demand and the progress we have made on our unit economics, we're investing behind them to scale faster and expect them to be even larger drivers of growth over time. In addition, we're also seeding longer-term bets in areas such as consumer and new retail TAMs, where our scale and platform advantage gives us a unique opportunity to compete and win. Given these are earlier-stage opportunities, we will be disciplined in how we invest and will keep you updated as they progress.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

As we have shared with you before, we want to compound this business over time to $10 billion in ARR and beyond. As margins continue to scale in our core business, we will remain disciplined in how we invest back into our newer TAMs and emerging bets, and apply the same rigor around capital allocation that got us here. I want to thank every Toaster for their dedication and commitment to Toast. We would not be here without all of your work. Thank you to our customers and investors for your continued support as well. With that, I'll turn the call over to Elena.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

Thank you, Aman, and everyone for joining us today. I want to start by recognizing our team. Q2 came in ahead of expectations across the board, and our results reflect the consistent execution happening throughout the company every day. We posted strong top and bottom-line results in the second quarter. ARR grew 25%, and our recurring gross profit streams increased 28% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA grew to $221 million, and GAAP operating income was $152 million, a 26% margin. On a GAAP basis, we are operating above rule of 50 with recurring gross profit growth plus operating margin reaching a high of 57% in Q2, demonstrating the strength of our business model and persistent focus on balancing durable growth and profitability. We added a record 9,500 net new locations in Q2, growing total locations 22% from a year ago to approximately 180,000.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

Our net add momentum reflects demand for the Toast platform and the strength of our go-to-market execution across our core and new TAMs. The breadth of our platform and value we provide customers is also driving sustained growth in monetization. Total take rate, measured by recurring gross profit as a percentage of GPV, was 98 basis points in Q2, up five basis points from a year ago. SaaS ARR grew 27% year-over-year, driven by location volume and consistent mid-single-digit ARPU growth. Subscription gross profit increased 32%, outpacing subscription ARR and revenue growth, benefiting from continued margin expansion. SaaS gross margins were up approximately 240 basis points year-over-year from ongoing optimization efforts, including leveraging AI to transform customer support. Payments ARR grew 23%, and fintech gross profit increased 26% in the second quarter versus a year ago.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

GPV was $61 billion, up 22%, with GPV per location flat. In the core, GPV came in better than expected, with strong same-store sales trends throughout the quarter, including a modest benefit from the World Cup at the end of June. Fintech net take rate was 59 basis points, with payments take rate at 50 basis points. Payments take rate grew year-over-year from the same levers we've seen over the last several quarters: adoption of new products, cost optimization efforts, and small targeted pricing moves. Non-payments fintech solutions, led by Toast Capital, contributed $57 million in gross profit and nine basis points to take rate. Customer demand for capital remains strong, and defaults remain within our expectations, thanks to our data advantage and disciplined underwriting approach. Moving down the P&L, hardware and professional services gross profit was negative 11% of our recurring gross profit streams.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

During the quarter, we received a tariff refund of approximately $10 million that was not contemplated in our Q2 guidance. Based on the current landscape, this represents the bulk of the refunds we expect to receive. With respect to the dynamic memory market, we've taken several mitigation steps to manage hardware COGS and our supply chain and have already reduced the memory cost impact for 2026 and 2027 versus our original expectations. A few examples of actions we've taken. Leveraging earlier generations of our hardware, transitioning certain hardware to lower-cost memory, and opportunistically buying at attractive prices in the spot market to complement our direct vendor relationships. We'll continue to pull these levers and evaluate other areas to lower costs while meeting customer demand and maintaining our best-in-class hardware.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

When the memory market stabilizes, we're going to come out with structurally better hardware margins than before, thanks to the optimization work we're doing across hardware product costs and supply chain. Operating expenses increased 19% from a year ago, excluding $29 million of bad debt and credit-related expenses. Our investment priorities remain consistent, fueling continued share gains in the core, scaling our new TAMs, building the AI product capabilities that will differentiate Toast for years ahead, and seeding long-term bets. Sales and marketing expenses increased 22%, reflecting incremental investments to support our sustained strong location growth. In the core, we're growing our upsell and account management teams and going deeper across sub-segments of the TAM like non-native English-speaking customers. Plus, we're increasing our go-to-market presence across new TAMs. R&D expenses grew 23%. We're investing to deepen the product capabilities that matter most.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

Our agentic platform, vertical-specific innovations in each new TAM, and AI tooling across the organization to improve productivity. The early results with products like Toast IQ Grow give us confidence in our right to win when we harness our data and AI capabilities to do more for our customers. In Q2, adjusted EBITDA grew 38% to $221 million, and margins expanded 240 basis points to 37%. This reflects strong top-line execution, continued discipline across the cost structure, and the tariff refund benefit. Free cash flow was $130 million in the second quarter, down versus a year ago from our strategic decision to acquire and hold more hardware inventory in the near term. We expect the conversion of adjusted EBITDA into free cash flow to improve in the back half of 2026.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

Over time, we expect to see a corresponding benefit to free cash flow with higher conversion rates when we choose to scale down to more normalized inventory levels. GAAP operating income was $152 million, and GAAP EPS was $0.26, both nearly doubling from a year ago. We're complementing strong growth with leverage down the P&L, reflecting disciplined expense management, including stock-based compensation and a lower diluted share count. SBC was 10% of recurring gross profit, down 400 basis points from a year ago, a function of disciplined equity grant practices and lapping the elevated grant values following our IPO. Year to date, we repurchased over 19 million shares for $486 million. Approximately $100 million remains on our share repurchase authorization. We will continue to opportunistically buy back shares based on market conditions to support long-term shareholder value. Turning to guidance.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

For the third quarter, we expect total subscription and fintech gross profit to grow 22%-24% year-over-year, and adjusted EBITDA to be $210 million to $220 million. On the back of our strong first half results, we're raising our full-year 2026 outlook. We now expect recurring gross profit to grow 23%-25% and adjusted EBITDA to be $805 million to $825 million. We strategically chose to reinvest the tariff refund into key growth initiatives and to seed long-term bets. As a result, we're increasing our full-year adjusted EBITDA guidance by less than the 2Q beat. Let me provide some context on our guidance and how we're managing the business for the long term. We're building a generational company that compounds at top-tier growth rates over the next five to 10 years.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

We have a tremendous runway in front of us across core and Horizon Two, the opportunity set to build new S-curves keeps growing as we scale and expand. We remain disciplined capital allocators and manage our investments across these multiple horizons. The core business is Horizon One with a proven growth algorithm and strong cash flow generation. It operates at Rule of 60 with over 20% growth and over 40% margins. We're balancing ongoing efficiency gains with investments in AI products to unlock the significant opportunity to do more for customers. Deploying AI tooling internally will unlock more efficiency and productivity gains as we automate work and the teams reimagine how they operate. This positions us to sustain Rule of 60 in the core with healthy growth An ongoing margin expansion on the path to meaningfully higher margins over time. New TAMs, international enterprise and retail are Horizon Two.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

We expect total ARR to nearly double to $200 million this year, each is on a path to healthy unit economics at scale. Given the positive signal, we're investing the scale even faster and accelerate our path to be a market leader in each. With the potential for billions of ARR across these businesses and high terminal margins, given the leverage they get from our core, we're confident these investments will have significant ROI. Lastly, we're seeding longer-term horizon bets like consumer and other retail verticals. As we scale and add capabilities, our right to win across more areas of local commerce expands. Our goal is for these businesses to become key growth drivers for the company three to five years out.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

We'll take the same gated approach to incubating them like we did with retail and international, only deploying more capital as we find product-market fit and meet certain success criteria. If we don't see success over a period of time, we'll pull the investment back and either redeploy to the next opportunity or expand margin. With our momentum and the opportunities ahead, we believe reinvesting upside into long-term growth areas with high potential ROI is the best path to maximize our long-term enterprise value. In 2026, we're managing to modest margin expansion consistent with the framework we laid out coming into the year and reiterated with today's guidance. We plan to continue operating with this general framework focused on sustained growth and gradual margin expansion as long as our investments are meeting our expectations.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

That keeps us on a path to 40%+ long-term adjusted EBITDA margins with the timing firmly in our control. With the strength of our core and confidence in the margin potential in new TAMs, we believe there's a path to a much higher margin profile over time. The first half of this year was a strong chapter for Toast. We're entering the back half with momentum and confidence in where we're headed, and we're incredibly excited about the opportunity ahead. I will turn the call back over to the operator to begin Q&A.

Operator

At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. I will turn the call over to Michael Senno for Q&A.

Michael Senno
Michael Senno
SVP of Finance at Toast

Thanks, Kristalyn. All right. We'll get our Q&A started. First question is from Tim Chiodo at UBS. Tim.

Tim Chiodo
Tim Chiodo
Analyst at UBS

Great. Thank you, Michael. Toast IQ Grow, this is a great example of an AI tool that's got a human aspect as well. It supports the restaurants. It supports your ARPU growth. You hit on this a little bit during the prepared remarks, meaning Toast IQ Grow might just be the first of many of these types of tools that could be supportive of both the restaurants and Toast ARPU. You touched on bookkeeping, tax, payroll, scheduling. Maybe you could just talk a little bit more about these potential additional modules, if you will, and what they could mean to longer-term ARPU growth. Thank you.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Hey, Tim. That's exactly the vision over the long term to build out our authentic platform. Maybe just to zoom out for a second and look at the context of how we got here. Toast started off as a point-of-sale system, then evolved to be really this broader platform. Customers love the fact that it's an all-in-one integrated platform that's got a single point of support, and that's what drives a lot of our growth today. One of the pieces of feedback we've gotten from operators over the past year is they find it hard to leverage everything Toast offers. They're spread thin just trying to run their businesses. Even when they're using the Toast software, it might outsource the function of marketing, for example, or payroll and tax, or inventory management, or bookkeeping to a third-party provider.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

We saw that as an important opportunity for us where we said, could Toast take on not just the software that's needed to run the business, but actually take on some of that work? We started off with this marketing agent, which is Toast IQ Grow. I think what has been really powerful about Toast IQ Grow is that, one, we're leveraging data across, and learning across 150,000 plus customers to figure out that, okay, what are the best ways to have a great online ordering presence or a website, optimized SEO, advertising, marketing? We're also leveraging data on both when the restaurant is busy and when it's not, as well as data on guests. That's what's really allowing us to build a platform where it's actually outperforming what humans can do.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Restaurants that switch to our Toast IQ Grow platform, agent rather, are seeing better results. Are seeing same-store sales growth. As we go beyond Toast IQ Grow, we're using the same approach and framework, and we're looking at what are areas where we can not just provide software, but start to take on some of that work. It's early, but you look at something as simple as voice AI, for example, picking up the phone in a restaurant on a drive-thru. Over time, we're looking at use cases around scheduling and payroll and tax. Think about kind of forecasting demand to be smarter about scheduling employees and then making sure that we're getting the best employees the best shifts.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

We're also looking at use cases around inventory management, bookkeeping, and accounting. Really what we're focused on is, one, what are areas where restaurants are leveraging third-party services today, and where we have a right to win and create value that's outsized relative to because of the data and context we have.

Tim Chiodo
Tim Chiodo
Analyst at UBS

Thank you.

Michael Senno
Michael Senno
SVP of Finance at Toast

Thanks, Tim. We'll take our next question from Harshita Rawat at Bernstein.

Harshita Rawat
Harshita Rawat
Analyst at Bernstein

Hi, good afternoon. Just a follow-up on Toast IQ Grow. I know it's early days, but any indications on kind of how many locations are kind of converting from kind of trial to paid? How should we also think about like the incremental ARPU here because, in considering that some of the products are kind of already restaurants are paying for. Then also considering the kind of dedicated marketing manager, how should we also kind of think about the long-term growth margin potential for this product considering from the cost? Thank you.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Yeah. Great question, Harshita. One, as I shared, this product, incremental to the software we provide, this product's on track to be the fastest product to $10 million ARR. We're seeing that's really driven by really good traction, both especially in our upsell funnel where customers see the value really. Like the main driver of that is we're showing that when customers pick our platform, they're seeing same store sale growth. I think in terms of margins, if you look at all AI products out there in the market today, it's often pick your use case. It's like building coding software or support. It's often a combination of AI and humans, and it's the same approach that we've taken where the AI is generating, leveraging all the data and context we have, the first pass. It's like, okay, how do you optimize restaurants' social, digital presence?

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

What's the best attempt at a marketing campaign and the copy on the marketing campaign or on advertising? We've got humans reviewing and approving those workflows. As we've gotten some early scales, we've already seen the gross margins improve. Frankly, I have no concerns long term about what the gross margins of that business could be. We're a lot more focused right now to your earlier question about product market fit and looking at the funnel really closely to make sure that there's a path here to really accelerate growth on that product.

Harshita Rawat
Harshita Rawat
Analyst at Bernstein

Okay.

Michael Senno
Michael Senno
SVP of Finance at Toast

Thanks, Harshita. All right. We'll move on. We'll take our next question from Will Nance at Goldman Sachs.

Will Nance
Will Nance
VP at Goldman Sachs

Thanks for taking the questions, guys. I wanted to ask a question on margins. I think delivering a pretty clear message tonight about the continued runway you have to drive efficiencies while also maintaining the top-line growth rates and reinvesting into the business. I heard the commentary on sustainable of 60% performance margins in the core already being higher than 40%. I guess with the incremental commentary today, I'm wondering if you could just talk qualitatively about where some of that confidence is coming from. For instance, is it coming more from the unlock of seeing more potential in the core to drive leverage over time, or have you seen some more evidence on some of the expansion verticals that make you think the margins can trend significantly higher?

Will Nance
Will Nance
VP at Goldman Sachs

I'm sure it's a mix of both, but maybe just qualitatively, what are some of the examples you've seen that's given you that anchored confidence? Thanks for taking the question.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

Thanks, Will, for the question. The short answer is it is both, right? We are really proud of being really disciplined in terms of capital allocation. Zooming out, our framework is we are really positioning the company to be a much bigger company, or we are building a generational company where we believe we can be much bigger than we are today. Some of that comes from both the way we manage our capital allocation and the discipline that we see. Also to the point you made, our new TAMs are showing incredible signal already. Aman talked about reaching $200 million in ARR. We have always said to the extent that we see success, we are going to actively choose to invest, and that is exactly what we are doing.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

Now we are going to do it in a very sustained, in a very disciplined way, where we are going to sustain growth, but at the same time, deliver gradual margin expansion. We are seeing all of the proper signals. Of course, AI presents an opportunity for us as a business to reimagine how we work, and continue this effort that we have had for many years, really around efficiency. We think we can unlock even more efficiency. That is why the commentary and the script is around meaningfully higher margins. That is because we are going to continue this focus on efficiency, but also as we become an AI native company, AI first company, we will see some benefit from that as well.

Will Nance
Will Nance
VP at Goldman Sachs

Thanks for taking the question.

Michael Senno
Michael Senno
SVP of Finance at Toast

Thanks, Will. We will move on to our next question. Darrin Peller at Wolfe. Darrin, take it away.

Darrin Peller
Darrin Peller
Managing Director at Wolfe

All right. Thanks, Michael. Look, it's really nice to see the strength in the location adds this quarter. Can you just touch on the composition of the net adds look like? How would you assess the performance in the core then versus the expansion? I know you certainly are highlighting the success you're having in the ARR side, but just in terms of number of users that are showing up there, and how that's contributing. Thanks, guys.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Of course. First off, the results we had in Q2 and really the first half are really, really strong. I'm really proud of the sales team's performance. I think we had a new watermark, 9,500 net adds this quarter. I think previously the watermark was 8,500. Really, if you look at it, the majority of that came from our core business, right? This is the SMB and mid-market business. We continue to see really strong win rates. We think we're taking stronger GPV share gains versus anyone else in our core business. Haven't seen anything fundamentally change on the competitive side. I think this goes back to something I said earlier, which is, I think one point that's maybe underappreciated a bit is if you look at why customers choose Toast, it's not just because of the point of sale. They're picking this all-in-one platform.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

That's what drives our win rate. It's the capabilities around the operations of the restaurant, both front of house and back of house. It's the guest experience and all the tools there. It's the employee experience, the suppliers. It's the fintech products. It's the lending product. Now increasingly, it's products like Toast IQ Grow. For us, that's the focus, is to continue to drive more and more value for our customers. We're big believers in continuing to be customer-obsessed and not competition-obsessed. That's showing up in our win rates and in the productivity of the sales team.

Darrin Peller
Darrin Peller
Managing Director at Wolfe

Thanks, Aman.

Michael Senno
Michael Senno
SVP of Finance at Toast

Thanks, Darrin. We'll turn to Stephen Sheldon at William Blair for our next question.

Stephen Sheldon
Stephen Sheldon
Analyst at William Blair

Thanks for taking my question. I guess just wanted to go back to Grow. I'm just curious what the early learnings have been around getting customers to implement and optimize around these agentic capabilities. I know Grow is the only solution you have out there right now from the agentic side. How much hand-holding are you needing to provide to get customers up and running, and is that going to be pretty common as we look forward?

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Yeah. We're still learning. I'll just start by saying, I think it's in the context of our business and our scale, even though Toast IQ Grow is growing at a rapid clip, it's still very early. I think what we see is. I'll go back to what I said earlier actually, which is if you look at how we build software, we have incredible tools. We still need human oversight on top of those tools to make sure we're getting the most out of AI. I think it's the same mindset where our customers are coming to us and saying, "Look, we're outsourcing this work of marketing to somebody already.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

If you could take that on, and you can do it better, that's awesome." Our approach is we're using all the data and context we have, and we are letting AI drive the first pass of what, for example, a great website looks like, or what are the ways in which you have great online ordering and digital presence. What are the right offers you need to generate? What's the best attempt at a marketing campaign or an ad on social? Then you've got our marketing success managers reviewing and approving that work. I think one of the reasons we've been able to see such strong impact where customers that switch to Toast IQ Grow increase same-store sales is because we've got really unique data.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

An example is we're looking at the restaurant's data in terms of when they're busy, when they're not, what are the things that make that brand and that restaurant what it is. On the guest side, we know guest preferences, so that over time, these campaigns can get hyper-personalized. I think we're back to we're learning a lot about what creates the best possible campaigns. I expect that over time, it'll get better and better in terms of the quality of these campaigns, the conversion rates. The early traction so far has been really positive. This business is running positive margins already. It's increasing, and of course, the growth has been stellar.

Stephen Sheldon
Stephen Sheldon
Analyst at William Blair

Good to hear. Thank you.

Michael Senno
Michael Senno
SVP of Finance at Toast

Thanks, Stephen.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Thank you.

Michael Senno
Michael Senno
SVP of Finance at Toast

We'll take our next question from Dan Dolev at Mizuho.

Dan Dolev
Dan Dolev
Analyst at Mizuho

Hey, guys. Great to see those results. I just wanted to ask a question about the hardware optimization costs maybe. Elena, can you unpack, be a little more specific on some of the savings? Maybe any initial views on the 2027 impact. We're getting that a lot from investors today. Really appreciate it. Great results again.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

Yeah. Thanks, Dan, for the question. Definitely a very, I would say, fluid environment. I would expect this P&L impact in 2027 to be greater than 2026, just based on how we account for inventory. I think there's really three things I'll leave you with. I said this in my remarks, but I'll just reinforce a few points. One is we've done a lot of work to improve the impact that we originally shared for both 2026 and 2027. That's really the great work from the hardware ops team deploying mitigation strategies, and I can talk about those. Two, we feel very confident about the supply, and we have supply for both 2026 and 2027.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

Three, a really important point, because we've done this deep dive, over the long term, we're really confident that this work will lead to improved hardware margins over the long run, after the memory market stabilizes. We've done a lot of work to not only impact the near term, but also structurally what the hardware margins look like over the long term. I feel really great about the work, and we're going to continue to do that and optimize anywhere we can really across the hardware P&L.

Dan Dolev
Dan Dolev
Analyst at Mizuho

Thank you.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Thanks, Dan.

Michael Senno
Michael Senno
SVP of Finance at Toast

Thanks, Dan. We'll take our next question from Adam Frisch at Evercore.

Adam Frisch
Adam Frisch
Analyst at Evercore

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Your message is crystal clear in the sense that you're investing for growth and for good reason. For some who may question that, I thought I'd ask it a little bit differently. If you could ballpark it, how much of your increased operating cost is by choice, like your choice to invest in sales and product development and stuff like that, and how much is out of your control, like memory costs? The question that we're getting tonight is, are you considering a resource rationalization in the coming quarters? Thank you.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

Yeah. I'll take these. Number one, while hardware is an important part of our P&L, zooming out, there's a much bigger cost structure that we're managing, and we're actively choosing to invest. We've sort of laid out the reasons why. We have a ton of conviction around not only these new TAMs replacing Horizon three bets, if you just think about the position we're in, we're in an incredibly strong position as a company with our core business at 40% margins operating at rule of 60. Now we're in this position where we want to sustain growth over the long term, but also do that in a very disciplined way, which is why we've said we'll always have some gradual margin expansion. We're seeing great signal. That's a positive sign. That means we're investing behind that great signal.

Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez
CFO at Toast

That's sort of the overarching kind of theme you should take from it. In terms of headcount and rationalization of headcount, we're always incredibly disciplined, frankly, around every headcount we hire, and that's not going to change. As we consider AI, that allows us to reimagine how we work and consider across the company how we can scale even more efficiently. I do feel very confident in our ability to drive to meaningfully higher margins over the long term as we begin to adopt AI across the company. That's not just for our customers, but just even in how we work. I hope I got most of your questions answered.

Adam Frisch
Adam Frisch
Analyst at Evercore

Yeah.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

I think maybe, just to build on what you said, just to get specific for a second, if you look at our plan this year, we saw some opportunity based on the performance in our strategic cuisines. This is the non-English speaking reps, and we've added some additional investment. With retail, we see opportunity to increase in sales investment. We've green lighted that. Toast IQ Grow, similarly, we've seen some great early signal with our AI products. Back to your question about choice, a lot of it's our choice. We are leaning into areas that will allow us to grow over the long term.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

I think as you can imagine, for example, our new TAMs going from $100 million to $200 million this year gives us even more conviction to say, "Let's actually try to move even faster." And while there is always puts and takes in terms of the EBITDA in year, at least my expectation is hardware over time will normalize back to what the margins were pre this memory issue. The thing to take away is a lot of the focused investment, in fact, even beyond is the right thing to invest in. Some investments in consumer, for example, or these new verticals beyond the ones we are in today are by choice because we believe in the long-term potential.

Adam Frisch
Adam Frisch
Analyst at Evercore

Thanks, guys.

Michael Senno
Michael Senno
SVP of Finance at Toast

Awesome. Thanks, Adam. We are going to take our last question today from Tien-tsin Huang at JPMorgan. Tien-tsin?

Tien-tsin Huang
Tien-tsin Huang
Analyst at JPMorgan

Thanks a lot, Michael. Appreciate that. Kind of building on Adam's question there. I understand the incremental investment created by the tariff refund. Seems like the visibility on expenses is better. Building on what you just responded to, I am curious, just prioritization of your incremental investments, where are you seeing the fastest ROI? It sounds like there is a lot of interesting things going on like sports and entertainment. You mentioned fuel payments, things like that. Just hoping you could reorganize where you are seeing the fastest ROI, if that makes sense. Thank you.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Tien-tsin, I think first of all, we want to make sure that any opportunities that exist in our core business to maximize growth, we're focused on that. We talked about some sales capacity in our core in strategic cuisines. This is the non-English part of the TAM. Toast IQ Grow, we've seen some really early signals that's really positive, and to actually unlock some investment there. Some of that is actually also more broadly on AI products beyond Toast IQ Grow. Obviously, that'll take time to materialize, but we're seeing the signal that we can take on some of the work that's beyond the software and take on some of the services work for restaurants over time with AI. In our new TAMs, I get this question internally a lot about prioritization too.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Maybe I'll start by saying in our retail business, we've got SaaS ARPU is already there closest, just within a couple of years to our core business. We look at the sales capacity we have and the productivity of the team that we have, and we say we should try to go faster, especially because I think the team's building conviction that as we get to scale, we're going to see some of those flywheel effects where once you get to 3, 4, 5% market share and grow, we expect there to be tailwinds on top of funnel, on conversion, on win rate. We're leaning in there. Then I think internationally in an enterprise, we're being opportunistic. You said sports entertainment is one example to find areas where we can invest.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Then I think whether you look at the future, Elena talked about this horizons framework, lots of investment in our core, investments against our new TAMs. Then we've also got some investments against bets that set up longer term future growth. For example, in retail, you see fuel expansion, for example, recently leaning into grocery. We're also looking at additional subverticals. We're looking at bets around consumer. We didn't talk a lot about that in today's call, but we've seen really good monthly active user growth on that app as is Toast Local. Really across the board where we see opportunity, we're leaning in. Elena and team do a great job of making sure that while we're leaning into growth, we're also looking at all the opportunities to drive efficiency in the business, especially with what AI will make possible.

Tien-tsin Huang
Tien-tsin Huang
Analyst at JPMorgan

Yep. No, that's good stuff. Nice job. Thank you.

Aman Narang
Aman Narang
CEO at Toast

Thank you.

Michael Senno
Michael Senno
SVP of Finance at Toast

Thanks, Tien-tsin. That wraps up our call for today. Thanks everyone for joining. Please reach out with any questions, and hope everyone has a great evening.

Operator

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

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