Unicorn Toast? - or Toast becomes a Unicorn

Boston’s Restaurant technology startup Toast has pulled in $115 million  givingit a valuation of $1.4 billion.

 Toast plans to invest the new equity funding in research and development, hiring, and expanding its global operations. Toast says it will grow from about 1,000 employees to more than 1,600 people worldwide by the end of next year.

The Series D investment was led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates. Tiger Global Management, a new investor in Toast, contributed to the round, along with previous Toast backers, raising more than $200 million in venture capital to date. 

Other investors include Generation Investment Management, Lead Edge Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Endeca founder and former CEO Steve Papa.

 Others raises this year include American Well’s $290 million-plus round, $150 million for Fuze, and $110 million for Circle.

So what does toast do?

Toast sells cloud-based software that can handle a range of tasks for restaurants, including executing payments, handling online orders, managing customer rewards programs, and tracking things such as sales, customer ordering data, food inventory, and hours worked by staff. The company says tens of thousands of restaurants use its products, including the Jamba Juice and B.GOOD chains.

Earlier this year, Toast rolled out a handheld payments device, its first hardware product designed in-house. The new product puts the company in competition with tablet makers like Samsung and Apple, and intensifies its rivalry with other payments technology companies, such as Square.

Toast was founded in 2011 by Steve Fredette, Aman Narang, and Jonathan Grimm, three veterans of Endeca, the enterprise software company sold to Oracle for $1.1 billion. Toast’s CEO is Christopher Comparato, another Endeca alum. (The four Toast executives are pictured above.)