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PAR Technology Corporation
PAR Technology sells cloud software and hardware that restaurants and retailers use to take orders, run their kitchens, and manage their operations.
PAR Technology makes the software and gadgets that keep restaurants running. If you've ordered a burger at a drive-thru or paid at a counter, there's a decent chance the cash register and the screen behind it were made by PAR. The company started out decades ago building point-of-sale hardware — the physical terminals where orders get rung up — and that business still exists as a smaller piece of the pie.
The bigger and faster-growing part today is software. Its main product, called Punchh, is a loyalty and marketing platform that lets restaurant chains run rewards programs and send customers personalized deals. Its Brink product is a cloud-based point-of-sale system that runs on tablets and connects directly to the kitchen and to online ordering. Together these tools help a restaurant chain see who its customers are, what they order, and how to get them to come back. PAR sells mostly to multi-location restaurant brands rather than mom-and-pop shops, because big chains need software that works the same way across hundreds of stores. The company is in a crowded fight. Toast, a much larger restaurant software company, is a fierce competitor in point-of-sale, and there are other players in loyalty and kitchen software too. PAR's pitch is that it can handle the whole stack — hardware, point-of-sale, loyalty, and back-office tools — for large chains, which is a stickier sale than a single piece of software. Why would a restaurant chain switch? Because losing a loyalty program and rebuilding it is painful, and PAR tries to make itself hard to rip out.
PAR has been spending heavily to build out its software business, mostly through acquisitions, and it hasn't always been profitable. It's a company betting that restaurants will keep moving from paper and old terminals to cloud tools, and that whoever owns the customer data and the ordering flow gets paid again and again. The hardware side gives it a foot in the door; the software side is where the long-term money is supposed to come from.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026