Olo

Olo is a restaurant technology and vertical SaaS company founded in 2005 by Noah Glass in New Haven, Connecticut. The company provides an open commerce platform that helps restaurant brands manage digital ordering, payments, delivery orchestration, guest engagement, loyalty, and catering operations. Olo is led by Founder & CEO Noah Glass alongside COO Jo Lambert, CFO Peter Benevides, CTO Jason Ordway, Chief Legal & People Officer Rob Morvillo, and Head of Sales Katie Cofer. The company serves enterprise and emerging-enterprise restaurant brands across North America.

Olo processed approximately $29B in gross merchandise volume and $2.8B in gross payment volume during 2024. After nearly 2 decades of building infrastructure for restaurant commerce, the company agreed to a roughly $2B acquisition by software-focused private equity firm Thoma Bravo. The broader significance extends beyond Olo itself. Restaurants are increasingly consolidating technology vendors, prioritizing ownership of customer relationships, and seeking unified commerce platforms that connect ordering, payments, loyalty, and guest data. Olo sits directly at the center of that shift.

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About Olo

Restaurant technology attracts a peculiar kind of attention. Consumers notice the app. Investors notice the transaction volume. Operators notice the problems nobody else sees. Olo built its business around those problems.

Founded in New Haven, Connecticut in 2005 as GoMobo, Olo emerged before smartphones transformed consumer behavior. Noah Glass identified a friction point hiding in plain sight: customers were spending valuable time waiting in line, while restaurants lacked efficient ways to manage growing demand. The original solution was remarkably simple. Guests could place orders through SMS. Restaurants received those orders through connected printers. It sounds almost quaint now, like explaining Netflix to someone who still rents DVDs. The underlying insight, however, proved durable.

While many technology companies chased consumer attention, Olo focused on infrastructure. Rather than becoming another marketplace competing for restaurant relationships, Olo positioned itself as the operating layer that helped restaurants maintain ownership of those relationships. Today, Olo provides a restaurant commerce platform spanning digital ordering, payments, delivery orchestration, catering, loyalty, and guest engagement. The company serves restaurant brands directly, helping operators unify customer interactions across channels while preserving control over their data, transactions, and guest experiences.

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Why Olo Matters Right Now

The restaurant industry has entered a different phase of digital transformation. The first wave was adoption. Restaurants needed online ordering. The second wave was expansion. Operators added delivery providers, payment systems, loyalty tools, marketing platforms, and customer engagement software. The third wave is consolidation. Operators are asking a tougher question: How many vendors can we eliminate without sacrificing capability?

That question favors infrastructure providers. Olo's platform acts as connective tissue between ordering channels, payment systems, loyalty programs, delivery providers, point-of-sale systems, and operational workflows. Rather than forcing restaurants into a closed ecosystem, Olo built an open architecture that integrates with hundreds of technology partners.

That distinction matters. Restaurant operators increasingly want flexibility without fragmentation. They want interoperability without complexity. They want data that moves across systems without requiring an archaeological dig every time someone needs a report. Olo's strategy aligns directly with those demands.

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The Problem Olo Is Solving

Modern restaurant technology stacks often resemble neighborhoods built by contractors who never exchanged phone numbers. Ordering lives in one system. Payments live in another. Marketing platforms maintain separate customer profiles. Delivery providers operate on entirely different infrastructure. Loyalty programs frequently become islands disconnected from the broader customer experience. The result is fragmented data, operational inefficiency, and inconsistent guest experiences.

Olo's platform was built to address that fragmentation. Its core product portfolio includes Ordering, Olo Pay, Dispatch, Sentiment, Catering+, and Olo Loyalty. The loyalty offering expanded through Olo's acquisition of Spendgo, adding deeper customer retention and engagement capabilities to the platform. Together, these products create a unified commerce layer for restaurant operators.

Consumers never see most of this technology. They simply expect the experience to work. The challenge for restaurants is that seamless experiences require enormous coordination behind the scenes. Olo's role is to make that complexity disappear.

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Market Context

Restaurant technology has entered a consolidation cycle that mirrors what occurred earlier in CRM, cybersecurity, and enterprise software. The market is moving away from standalone tools and toward integrated commerce platforms. That trend helps explain Olo's growth.

During 2024, Olo processed approximately $29B in gross merchandise volume and $2.8B in gross payment volume. Q4 2024 revenue reached $76.1M, representing 21% year-over-year growth. Growth continued into 2025. Q1 revenue reached $80.7M. Q2 revenue climbed to $85.7M. Q2 non-GAAP operating income reached $13.1M, while dollar-based net revenue retention reached 114%.

Those numbers suggest something important. Olo is not merely adding customers. Existing customers are expanding their usage across the platform. That dynamic often signals platform adoption rather than dependency on a single point solution.

The competitive landscape includes restaurant technology providers such as Toast, PAR Technology, NCR, and DoorDash Commerce Platform. Each approaches the market differently, but Olo's open ecosystem model has helped differentiate its position among restaurant brands seeking flexibility and integration depth.

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Leadership and Team

Many technology companies evolve faster than their leadership teams. Olo has taken a different path. Noah Glass remains Founder & CEO nearly 20 years after launching the company. That level of continuity is increasingly rare in enterprise software and even rarer among companies that have navigated startup growth, public markets, and private ownership transitions.

The executive leadership team includes Noah Glass as Founder & CEO, Jo Lambert as COO, Peter Benevides as CFO, Rob Morvillo as Chief Legal & People Officer, Jason Ordway as CTO, and Katie Cofer as Head of Sales. Restaurant operators tend to value reliability over novelty. Infrastructure businesses serving mission-critical workflows benefit from steady execution more than dramatic reinvention.

In many respects, Olo's leadership story mirrors its product philosophy: build durable systems, improve them consistently, and avoid unnecessary drama. That sounds simple. It rarely is.

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Why Hiring Momentum Matters

Hiring trends often reveal more about a company's future than marketing campaigns. Companies hire because demand requires capacity. They hire because customers need support. They hire because product roadmaps are expanding. Olo continues to recruit across engineering, product, sales, customer success, and operational functions. Viewed through a market lens, that hiring activity signals continued investment in platform development and customer expansion.

For technical talent, Olo represents an increasingly uncommon opportunity. The company operates at meaningful scale. Its platform processes billions of dollars in commerce. Its products sit inside real-world transaction flows rather than engagement metrics designed primarily to impress advertisers.

Engineers, product leaders, and operators who enjoy solving infrastructure challenges often find that type of work more rewarding than chasing another consumer growth loop. Infrastructure may not generate the loudest headlines. It tends to generate durable businesses.

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What the Thoma Bravo Acquisition Signals

When Thoma Bravo agreed to acquire Olo in a transaction valued at approximately $2B, the deal represented more than a financial milestone. It reflected a broader market thesis.

Thoma Bravo is one of the largest software-focused private equity firms in the world, with investments spanning enterprise software, cybersecurity, infrastructure platforms, fintech, and vertical SaaS businesses. Firms like Thoma Bravo are drawn to businesses embedded inside critical workflows.

Olo fits that description. The company sits close to transactions. It benefits from recurring software revenue. It serves enterprise customers. It gains value as customers adopt additional products across the platform.

Infrastructure businesses rarely dominate headlines. They create dependency. Investors tend to notice the difference.

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The Bigger Industry Shift

The broader restaurant software market is moving toward unified commerce platforms that combine ordering, payments, loyalty, customer intelligence, and operational data. That shift is driven by economics.

Restaurants want stronger ownership of customer relationships. They want better visibility into transaction behavior. They want fewer disconnected systems competing for attention and budget. Olo sits directly at the intersection of those priorities.

Its story is not fundamentally about food. It is not fundamentally about software. It is about control. Control over customer relationships. Control over transaction data. Control over the infrastructure increasingly responsible for restaurant profitability.

For nearly 20 years, Olo has quietly positioned itself at the center of that transition. The ownership structure may have changed following the Thoma Bravo acquisition, but the underlying market forces remain intact. Restaurants still need infrastructure. Olo still provides it. That remains a powerful place to operate.

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