So to begin, I really want to welcome everybody to the New York Stock Exchange and also to the PAR Technology Investor Day. We're really happy to see so many people here in personal attendance, as well as the large number of people who are registered and participating virtually on the webcast. You know, I think, you know, we've seen. There's certainly a lot of interest in the PAR story of late, and I think even more exciting is the amount of interest from new investors into PAR. And I think it's a really appropriate time for us to hold this Investor Day. It gives us the opportunity to really ground these new investors into what we feel is a very exciting day one PAR story. For those of you I haven't met as yet, my name is Chris Byrnes.
I am Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Business Development at PAR. Before we get started, I do have to review our Safe Harbor. I remind attendees today, both in person and virtually, that this presentation may include forward-looking statements that reflect management's expectations based on currently available data. However, actual results are subject to future events and uncertainties. The information reviewed in this presentation related to projections or other forward-looking statements may be relied upon and subject to the Safe Harbor statement, including our annual and quarterly filings with the SEC. So now digging into the event itself, I think we've got a really impressive and fun lineup. We'll start out with Savneet Singh, our CEO, who'll give a real overview strategy of the business and where we're going. We'll then transition to Oli Ostertag , who's the GM of our Operator Cloud business, and review everything Operator Cloud.
Then we'll have Joe Yetter come up and present Engagement Cloud. Joe is GM of Engagement. We'll segue into having our CTO come to the podium, Steven Berkovitz. Steven will review our R&D and engineering strategy, performance, and efficiencies. After Steven's presentation, we'll take a 15 to 20-minute break, just kind of refuel and stretch our legs. Coming back after break, we'll have Savneet come back to the stage in order to kind of give our go-to-market muscle pitch on tying strategy and product together. Finally, Bryan Menar, our CFO, will give some detailed analysis of our financials. And after Bryan 's presentation, we'll go into open Q&A, which will allow for in-person questions as well as questions virtually. I do ask for participants on the webcast to please submit their questions via email at ir@partech.com. That's ir@partech.com. Finally, some other bookkeeping items.
I just want to let everyone know that the slides and webcast links can be found on the Investor Relations page of our website. Also, in the lobby here today in the foyer, we have some exciting product demos that I hope the in-person attendees make themselves available to. We have Trevor, who will demo our TASK platform that we acquired earlier this year, and Anshul, who can demo PAR Punchh and PAR Ordering. Please make yourself available. Really get a sense of the value and products we deliver our customers every day. Without further ado, I want to certainly welcome everybody again and call Savneet Singh up to the stage, PAR Technology CEO.
First of all, thank you all for being here. I don't think, you know, six years ago when we jumped on this journey, we'd ever be here. So we really are humbled to be here, grateful that you're here, and hopefully we can lay out the foundation so that you're here six years from now. I'm going to start today talking a little bit about our strategy, our vision, where we're going. But really today is a lot more about meeting the rest of the PAR team and getting into the deep dives of what we're building, why we're building, and why we think we're going to win. And I'll wrap it up with our team and how I look at the market sizing and the opportunity in front of us.
Very much the founding premise six years ago of PAR still exists today, which was when we jumped into PAR. The idea or the inkling that we had back then was that restaurants and retailers were being eaten alive by software. Every aspect of their workflow was being either aided, disrupted, or transformed in some way with software eating bits and pieces of what they were doing, and Silicon Valley wasn't helping. CB Insights estimates that there are over 10,000 food startups in the last 10 years trying to come after this market, and the great opportunity and challenge here is that each one of these logos on here does something really cool, something really interesting. Every startup comes up to solve a very point solution in the restaurant and the hope that they can create ROI to that restaurant.
And so you, as a restaurant or food service operator, come in, get excited by all this tech, and you end up with something that looks like this. We call it vendor spaghetti at PAR. And the challenge that restaurants were dealing with is that they wanted to be innovative. They wanted to invest. They wanted to create a great guest experience, but they were buying point- of- sale from PAR, online ordering over there, you know, loyalty over here, AI over there. And you had this very disjointed tech stack that was incredibly expensive for you, the brand. It became very complex for your team members and became very, very frustrating for your customers. And as this goes to the enterprise, the problem is exponential because larger restaurant organizations or food service businesses have far more stakeholders. They have franchisees, they have district managers, they have private equity owners.
As you get larger, the complexity of your tech stack explodes, creating this mess that we have today. A great sort of anecdote or data point is that when we started on this PAR journey, you know, restaurants have gone from sort of five applications per store up to 10. You know, today there's probably 20 or 30 products running per store. This is a problem that is continuing to get worse and worse. The great challenge is that we think that there have been sort of categorically two ways to solve this. The first is what we call the single product solution. This is that vendor spaghetti. This is trying to find a solution for your online ordering from over here, your point of sale over there, your payments over there, your, you know, QR code payments over here.
It's trying to plug together all these different products to create some form of uniform guest experience. And, you know, I like to say that what this has done, it's turned CIOs and CMOs from these amazing people focusing on creating great guest experiences to glorified vendor managers. You end up taking your eye off the ball of your customer because you're trying to get all your vendors to work together. And the problem is, on that graph, that every single integration is a new, single point of failure. Something breaks here and cascades through everybody else and it all falls down. And so you're left with, what do you do? So the other option historically has been, let's build it ourselves. You know, I work at a big restaurant chain. I know the needs of my customers better than anybody else. Let me build something that is great.
And this is a completely failing strategy because it ruins your opportunity best in class. You start building for your own brand. You think you know it better, but technology evolves, markets move, and you realize, oh my God, yes, I built a really great point- of- sale system, online ordering system, but now I got to plug into Uber Eats and DoorDash and loyalty, and I got to make my product extensible. And you end up in the same vendor spaghetti, except this time you can't rationalize the cost because now you've hired hundreds of developers to try to keep this gigantic tech stack alive, and it gets harder and harder to manage over time. And so in the end, we think both of these options slow down our end customers. And this is where PAR comes in.
We're building a unified experience of best in class products that are built for the enterprise in this market. We've combined point- of- sale, back office payments with the engagement side of online ordering and loyalty to create a tighter, a better together integration that gives you, our guests, the control of your experience. We like to say we've taken you out of that vendor management and more into the experience creation. And we think we've done this in a way that removes the friction between the off premise and the on premise. You know, the great challenge is that the people that run restaurants today, they grew up in a world that was brick and mortar. It's where the brand promise of that in-store experience matters so much.
And that same brand promise, that same feeling you got when you went into a store, has to now match on your digital in the digital world. And those things don't connect because they're different vendors. It's hard to connect it all together. And so that's what we've been trying very hard to do is connect the digital to the in-store experience by connecting the front half, front of house and back of house through our better together integrations. And we've done this for the enterprise. Everything we've done is built for the enterprise first. Everything is battle tested. Everything is scaled and focused on that market of top end brands or brands that are emerging to become top end. And we think we've put together best in class solutions. We've stayed open during this journey.
Our products are open to 550 plus integration partners, and the flexibility of our system is enormous. It allows our operators to control things at the corporate level, whether it be menu pricing, integrations, product extensions, or down to the franchisee level, giving that great confidence. And this enterprise focus has really allowed us to power, we think, some of the most exciting brands in the world. Every single logo you see here is a PAR customer, but what's more exciting is every single one of them is a referenceable customer. They'll tell you who we are, why did we pick PAR. I'm pretty sure they'll all say we have the best products, but I think they'll also talk about that they want to engender themselves to PAR and our culture. And we've really worked hard to build partnership with these customers.
That leads into our mission, which is to enable personalized experiences that connect people to the brands, meals, and moments they love. We like to say food, people, nothing in between. Our mission is held up by our values. This is probably the most important slide you'll see today. You know, every company's got values. I used to joke at PAR, values were fancy posters on the wall. Everything we've done at PAR has been a result of this mission and values alignment. At PAR, we have five values. The first is Act with Urgency . We like to say we don't wait. We like people who don't wait for the elevator on the things that are most important. So we don't like you running to everything. We want you to run to what's most important. Our second value is Own It.
This is the idea that we want owners of PAR, not renters of PAR. Every problem must have one owner. This kind of guides how we operate internally. If there's a problem with a customer, one person owns that. It helps us unify our sort of remove decision by democracy and focus the ownership on one person. Our third value is Deliver Outcomes. This is our newest value. It's this idea that we don't care about the output. We don't care if you said you worked a thousand hours. We care did you solve a customer's problem. Similarly, if we're doing something internally, you know, if we have a new cybersecurity policy internally, the success is not that we deliver the output of a policy. The success is do we stop cyber attacks. These values are very guiding for us.
Our fourth value is Win Together. And it's the idea that for a win at PAR is if our customers win, our employees win, our community win, and you, our shareholders win. And all four of those constituents have to win for it to be considered a win at PAR. And our last value is Never Settle. And we call this our day one mentality. We sort of stole this from Amazon, but we really believe in this. You know, people keep saying, hey, great job, great job, great job. But every day at PAR, we say, this is the last day. How do we reinvent ourselves every single day? And we obsess over this. And I hope you'll feel that from everybody today. Now, when I say that these values aren't posted on the wall, I really do mean it. This is how we recruit.
This is how we hire. This is how we fire. This is how we promote. This is how we create opportunity, and every single person is measured on this. You know, the speakers you hear today, I think, will be a tremendous representation of this. After me, you're going to hear from Oli Ostertag . Oli joined us from a top 10 business school about four years ago. You know, he came from this great business school, and we literally threw him in the most undesirable job possible. We threw him in back office operations of an international business we were trying to shut down. He went from there six months later into, you know, operations at Brink, and then he went to chief of staff. Literally three years out of business school, he was running Brink, our most important product at the time.
Now, that's sort of a rocket ship type of move, but it happened because he lived these values. He truly owned the job. He delivered it. He wasn't scared to deliver bad news, and he demanded the results and the outcomes that mattered. He's a very, very special person. And again, we won't hold it against him that he didn't go to a top five school, but he sucked it up and really made it great. Joe Yetter, who speaks after Oli, Joe runs our engagement suite of products, our largest business. Joe was the first person I hired at PAR, and he had worked in a restaurant brand for, I think, five, six, seven years. And he came in, again, top school. And I said, hey, you're not coming here to build a POS company. We're coming here to create the 3G of software.
How are we going to do it? And so Joe came on for three months. He was my chief of staff. Then he went to go run our international business, that same business we were trying to figure out how to get the heck out of. Then we threw him to run our marketing department, to run our Drive-Thru business. Then he took over M&A, and then he took over Punchh. And again, rapid rise for somebody who was in his late 20s and his early 30s. And he's only there because he lived those values. He didn't think me first. He think PAR first. And he delivered every single step of the way. And so we create this platform for opportunity. Steven Berkovitz, our CTO, who's going to speak after Joe. Incredible person. No educational background. Completely non-traditional.
You know, I remember when he first interviewed, he just, he said, "Hey, I know you got a lot of fancy people and Ivy League schools. Like, I didn't go anywhere. Does that matter?" And I said, "No, we want doers. We want people to deliver outcomes." And we came to him and said, "Hey, we've got this great product. It's falling apart. We need somebody that can literally inspire the team, manage the team, but also write code. Can you do that?" And he came in and he delivered over and over and over again. And I'm excited for you to hear how we've kind of converted him from a tech guy to the best capital allocator at PAR and hopefully much more. And Bryan Menar, our CFO, who'll close us out. Bryan has been with PAR longer than anybody else, and he really represents that win together value.
He has this great ability to pull together amazing talent to come on board, see the PAR vision, and push us all forward in a way that's collective. The biggest takeaway for me here is this, which is if you ask me what's the moat of PAR over time, it's going to be the people we attracted. Because there are not just these folks in the room. There's two levels below that are as good, as motivational. Every single day, I say this completely seriously, they're gunning for my job, and it keeps me moving and me moving forward, and the layer underneath is pushing them. It is the most important thing we've done, and it is the single biggest reason we've had the success we've had at PAR are these values because we are obsessive about this. Okay. What the hell are we doing?
Our vision is to empower hospitality and retail excellence through frictionless technology and partnership. It's really trying to make it simple all over again. It's trying to give our customers the tools to deliver amazing experiences, and our goal is to be the largest food service technology company in the world by 2030. We think we've got a playbook to deliver on this. We break it into three buckets. The first bucket is we really think we have to build or acquire best in class products, and this is incredibly important. You will never see us acquire a product that is second in market, third in market, and bundle it with a number one product in the hope that the bundle wins. We believe every product has to stand on its own two feet and be the best in its market.
We demand it, and we have a very simple way of proving it, which is when we see product teams and they come to us and say, hey, I have the best product. It's the best of the best. The way we know it is, are you the highest priced product and are you selling the most? And if you can't do that, you're not the best product in market. And so we obsess over this idea of you've got to be best- in- class. You can't hope that the bundle wins. The products have to win on their own. And that product leadership drives everything we do. The second is we couple that product excellence with tremendous deep, deep vertical experience. And what this really means is that we aren't a private equity company trying to put a bunch of assets together.
We're trying to create an integrated experience to change the customer's outcomes, and to do that, we have to know, put ourselves in the customer's shoes, or we can't really deliver for them, and we care a lot about being experts, not just in our customer's business, but the ecosystem around us, and lastly, and most importantly, we believe we have to create what we call better together innovation, which will help our go-to-market, and what this really means is that we want to convince our customers that when they buy that first product, the real outcome they're looking for is that second product, and when they buy that second product, they should feel, believe, and know that buying two products from PAR creates a distinct outcome than if they were trying to buy two products from two different vendors.
Said differently, when you buy more from PAR, you should become stickier to PAR because you're actually getting differentiated outcomes. You're not just stuck to us because of a bundle. And if we can prove to our customers that every time you buy a PAR product, the unified experience gets better and better, it creates an amazing flywheel for us to go back to them over time. And that flywheel looks a little bit like this, and I'll break it into pieces. The first step of our flywheel is we call it landing with our hero products. Today, that's point of sale or loyalty. And the key part here is these are what we call best in class products. They are the best at what they do. They land and create the expand motion for us to go forward.
The second p art of our flywheel is to reinvest and launch a second product. And again, the point is to prove to our customers that when you buy that second product from PAR, you're just not getting a second product. It's that product A plus B creates a 1 + 1 = 3 in that situation, which is you're getting something you couldn't get before. Brink and Data Central is a great example that Oli will show you later. But when you buy Brink and Data Central, or excuse me, PAR POS and Data Central, it's very different than buying PAR POS and someone else's back office. The better together outcome is truly different. And if we can do that, we now have scaled economics.
We've now sold two products for the OpEx of one product, which then allows us, excuse me, to reinvest in our products, give us a better go-to-market motion, and then pushing forward, take more market share, and then have that opportunity to land that third and fourth product over and over and over again. And so this flywheel is real. It's really what's driving our growth today, which is we can continue to land more and more products by planting that first flag, second flag, third flag, and every additional product makes us stickier and increases the LTV of those customers. Now, underneath all of this is four value drivers that we think we're pushing to the end market. The first is the acceleration of digital transformation.
To be an investor in PAR, you have to kind of believe this, which is restaurants and retailers are at the very beginning of their digital journey. They're just in those early innings of adopting that infrastructure layer of technology that almost every other industry already has, and you know, I like to say that once they get that infrastructure layer, then they start buying software to manage software. And we're not even close to that today, and so we think we're at the very beginning of this market of restaurants and retailers adopting software today. The second is our products drive tremendous ROI. When you install Punchh, as an example, we can drive revenue almost immediately, but over the long time.
It's incredible to see that when you have a product that drives ROI and makes it demonstrable, that creates an incredible flywheel for us to sell more products. At the same time, our Operator Solutions find ways to cut costs immediately when you install Data Central, our back office product. It's really powerful to see just how fast we can show you that payback period. We think that the value of software is that we can not only accelerate your transformation, we can also save you costs and grow your revenue. The third is vendor consolidation. Excuse me. Vendor consolidation is an easier way to say that our customers are tired of adding more vendors. They don't want 30 vendors managing their stores. Imagine you're the CIO. You have to do 30 QBRs with 30 different vendors. It just doesn't work.
You know, how do you have a different menu on your online ordering system from your in-store system, from your drive-through, from your DoorDash? It's just a ton of stuff that doesn't work well together. And so they want that consolidation. And so again, we're benefiting from this wave of vendor consolidation. And lastly is this idea of enhanced experience. I can promise you, you call the CIO of any restaurant chain or CMO of any restaurant chain and ask them about their vendors for the last 20 years, nobody loves them. And I think we can deliver on that promise because what we can do is take the data we have across multiple products so that we actually know more about our customers and can provide better support.
And so we think underneath that flywheel I showed are these inherent secular drivers that are going to continue for years and years. So many of you know the story, but I'll talk to it quickly. You know, we were founded in 1968 as a defense contractor, but PAR, in its sort of modern way, was started in 1978 with the invention of the point- of- sale terminal. In 1982, we went public off the success of McDonald's selecting PAR as their sole source provider for point- of- sale. And for the next kind of five or 10 years, we grew incredibly quickly, but primarily as a hardware and services business. And that was a bad business decision because we went from this incredibly fast-growing company to a cyclical hardware and services company. So to rectify that, you know, albeit, you know, 25 years late, we acquired Brink in 2014.
Now, at the time, PAR POS Brink was in 300 stores. It was very much a product. It wasn't a business yet. But by 2018, when I came in and new management came in, we were in five or six thousand stores, and you could see the beginning of this software eating the restaurant thesis coming out. And so we completely restructured PAR, very much ripped out the old, brought in the new, put in a new team, new mission, new values, new capital. I think began this vision of, could we create this unified experience? At the end of 2019, we acquired Data Central, which began us on this idea of, can we create a unified platform? In April of 2021, we acquired Punchh. We then built out our payments product to connect all these products together. We crossed 100,000 sites, bolted on an ordering product.
Then this year, I think, was the most transformative year for PAR. We divested our government business to become a pure-play food service technology business. We expanded into the C-store vertical. And with the closing of TASK in July or August, we were able to take a global footprint. And so today, we are a pure-play global food service technology company, almost $250 million of ARR at the end of last quarter. And it's been this really rapid ascent from a tiny, tiny little business that had a small software business in the closet to a software forward-facing business that is completely focused on global food service. Now, if we transpose this business timeline onto a product timeline, you can see we started at point of sale. You'll hear from Oli soon, but point of sale is the fulcrum of every restaurant.
It is the most important product that they operate in. If your point- of- sale goes down, everything goes down. It just doesn't work. And back in 2019, what we noticed was that the data between the point- of- sale system and the back office systems didn't connect. And they really needed that because there was so much data between the two. You know, when you're running the point- of- sale system, do you really want to go to a separate system to then take the point of sale data and then look at your payroll and your inventory and your COGS? Like, why are those on two different systems? Why can't the data flow to one place to make your job easier? And so that led to the acquisition of Data Central, and we built out the back of house.
Then we had the idea of saying, well, if we've got the back of house, we should merge that to the front of house. Because when you have front of house data, you have the same desire to know, hey, what's the margin on this campaign I'm running? Can I tie those systems together? And so in 2021, we added Punchh. In 2022, we launched Payments, which in our eyes connected all of our products together, and we'll show you some really neat customer examples of that later today. And then we bolted on MENU at the end of 2022 to add our sort of off-premise ordering capabilities. And this collection of products became deeply integrated, creating this best in class integrated experience to our customers. From a financial perspective, we took over the business at the end of 2018.
We were $200 million of revenue, and less than 5% of it was software. Way less than 5% of it. We ended at $11 million of ARR. We probably had $5 million or $6 million of revenue at the time. We were still very much a hardware business, but even in our software business, our gross margins were in the 40s. We were not moving very quickly. We had about 7,500 customers. And then we began the transformation. We acquired about $130 million of revenue across loyalty, online ordering, back office, and engagement suite. We grew $100 million organically through those products. So while we were acquisitive, we never took our eye off the ball of the organic execution, and that's the key. The two of them have to work together.
We divested our government business, and we ended up here today, where we ended last quarter almost at a $400 million run rate. Over 60% of that is in software. Our gross margins have doubled during this period of time, and hopefully we'll continue to grow. We're in over 120,000 sites, and our ARR per share is now $6.9 per share, a massive change from where we started. And we really do believe we're just getting started. No one on this team feels we're anywhere close to conclusion. We're actually just getting started. So let me tell you where I think what we've done and where we're going. We laid the foundation in restaurants. We've solved the solutions in a vertical manner. We have POS, Online Ordering, Loyalty, Back Office. And then horizontally, we have our PAR Data Platform. We have PAR Payments. We have our Business Systems.
We think we've really solved that vertical of restaurants. Earlier this year, we expanded our verticals into C-store and fuel. Again, we have the verticalized solution of PAR Retail, but then we have our horizontal products of Data, Payments, and Business Systems. We just jumped into our third vertical of international. It's the same exact playbook here. We've got the TASK and Plexure platform, leveraging the PAR Data Platform, the PAR Business Systems, and the rest of PAR. We think that as we grow over time, these verticals will expand, and we'll be able to leverage the same playbook over and over and over again, which is we will continue to be acquisitive to create this very unified experience and build a very strong ecosystem around it.
And I think what we've learned as we've done this in restaurants and now doing this in C-store is that the same thesis holds. No matter if you're a C-store, a fuel operator, or a restaurant, you're suffering from the exact same challenges. And if we can deliver on that promise of best in class, but better together, we'll win over and over again. So I think in the end, the pitch for PAR is pretty simple. We're a pure-play provider in an industry that is rapidly driving towards technology. Everything we do is mission-critical. We've delivered growth for four years in a row at greater than 20%. But, you know, if you go back pre-pandemic as far more, we've expanded both globally and horizontally in different verticals, but also leveraging our systems across everything we do. And we've proven that we can execute and drive shareholder value.
Let me summarize the numbers. This is our ARR per share. And you can see it's grown very rapidly. But what I think is more interesting, and I'm skipping that because you guys have seen that before, excuse me, is what does this look like from an ROIC perspective? A couple of years ago, somebody asked, what keeps you at PAR? Why are you staying around? What's the math? Why does this make any sense? And so we did this analysis on one of our earnings calls, and we've kind of updated every quarter. And this is a very conservative way of looking at it. But the last 12 months, we spent about $31 million on sales and marketing for our software business. And we pulled in about $32 million of recurring revenue. This is before our acquisitions, which only make the state of it better.
If we could have assumed that we had one, and we sort of average this all out and say, let's assume we had one customer for $1. But what we sort of assume is that over time, that $1 will depreciate 5% a year, 5% churn rate. And then I said, let's assume our gross margin is 67%, which we reported last quarter. Again, very conservative because we sort of said we think this is going to grow over time. We said, what is our gross margin every single year from that stream of revenue on top? And then we said, let's do something else. Let's assume that for every dollar of new revenue, we have to add $0.20 of additional costs to support that revenue. Now, this is a generous assumption because we have not done that.
We haven't really grown our OpEx in two years. But even if we assumed that we needed an incremental $0.20 for every $1 of revenue, and again, that would be, you know, unlikely to happen, the IRR on that original $31 million of spend is still 43%. It's wildly, wildly positive. And what's crazy about what I just showed you here is this assumes that we never do a price increase. It assumes the customer life is only 10 years, but our churn rate is 5%, so the customer life should be 20. It assumes we have no gross margin improvement. It assumes $0.20 of incremental operating costs. And so the underlying economics of an individual customer are just so accretive, which is why we've been able to sort of show this inflection over the last 12 months.
So in the last 12 months, our adjusted EBITDA has improved by $36 million. $20 million was from acquisitions, so don't give us credit for that. But $16 million of it came from true operational improvements. And that $16 million came off a revenue base of around $130 million of recurring revenue. So it came off from a relatively small amount of recurring revenue. We were able to drive $16 million of incremental adjusted EBITDA. And I think it's because that flywheel I mentioned in those unit economics I showed on the prior slide. And that hasn't stopped us from focusing on growth. So our focus on that expense control has not slowed down our growth. We're still growing 25% organically, 93% inorganically.
I think, as I summarize today, what I hope you take from here today is that we really transformed our business into a pure-play global food service technology company. It's important that I highlight that when we started on this journey, we were a restaurant company doing POS. Today, we are global, and we are broader than restaurant and food service, serving far more than POS. We think we've got a proven playbook. Acquire best in class, couple it with deep expertise, and Better Together innovation and rinse and repeat that over and over again. Our flywheel is moving, and it's moving fast, and we're going to show you some numbers to prove that a little bit later. It's not taking our eye off the need and the desire to be profitable. Everything we've done has been a result of the culture that I mentioned earlier.
Literally, everything we've accomplished has been because of that. In 2018, you know, I started in Q4 of 2018, and on our balance sheet at Q4 of 2018, our cash and cash equivalents were $3.4 million, and we had like $15 million or $20 million in debt and a credit facility that was pulled, and today we're here. And that's not because we had a great strategy or a vision or anything like that. It was because we obsessed on this culture and driving this vision, and so we really, really think that's our big differentiator. And lastly, and I think you'll hear this throughout everybody from everyone today is that while we're proud of what we did the last six years, we really think we're at day one of a massive opportunity, and hopefully, you'll get to see from the rest of everybody else why we think that is.
So without further ado, let me invite Oli Ostertag , the General Manager of our Operator Solutions business, to walk you through PAR POS, Back Office, and Payments.
Perfect. Thank you, Savneet. So my name is Oli Ostertag . I'm the General Manager of the Operator Cloud business unit here at PAR. You know, before I begin, I just wanted to kind of take a step back. You know, I joined PAR four and a half years ago. And honestly, it's an incredibly proud moment for me, as well as the other people in this room, to be here today. Because four and a half years ago when I joined, you know, I came straight out of business school. Savneet was pitching me in Upstate New York, you know, dilapidated older building. And he told me, right, this is the growth story. Right?
He told me that it matters what horse you pick at the end of the day. Do you want to be one of a thousand at Amazon or one of two at PAR? Right? That's at the end of the day why I decided to join PAR. And it's been a really incredible journey. So at PAR, the way we've segmented our different divisions is according to who the buyer is. So the Operator Cloud business segment is focused on the operational buyers, which could be the CTO, the COO, the CFO. And the products that are included there are the point- of- sale platforms, the back of house platforms, as well as our Payments business. So our view of product for Operator Cloud has really been, you know, it just works. Like our philosophy has been very much like Apple. We're not bleeding edge.
We want to make sure that anything we provide at the very top, most demanding part of the market actually works. It needs to be performant at the very top. There's a big difference between a, you know, SMB business and an enterprise operator. Huge difference. And our products need to be able to manage those challenges from the get-go. These are not products that they need to grow into. These are products that actually on the first day need to, you know, actually drive ROI. So the past year, past two years have certainly been difficult in the restaurant space. You know, thankfully, enterprise has been less impacted than SMB, but the problems are only increasing. You know, there are labor shortages. There are input cost problems. The more tech you add, the harder it is for your administration to actually work.
We need to be able to tackle these challenges again at the very, very top of the market. Our product vision is innovation at scale. And you're going to hear this theme throughout this presentation today. Scaling products is very difficult. Innovating once you have 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 sites live is difficult. Our products begin by actually having a very strong foundation, investing heavily into the architecture of our products. Secondly, as Savneet mentioned before, best in class is incredibly important for us. Each product needs to be standalone best. We need to continue investing to make sure that there are not competitors out there that are out-running us while we're only getting started. Our products need to be open.
We need to make sure that those integrations, whether that's between our PAR products or whether the wider, you know, technological ecosystems, those integrations work, the APIs are great, and we need to make sure that when we do own both sides of an integration, that our products truly do work better together. You need to derive ROI from owning two products, three products that you are using together. Lastly, our philosophy has very much been that we want to take those traditional cost centers, such as payments, and actually make those revenue drivers for customers, provide a data layer there where they can operate more efficiently. That, in a nutshell, is how we engage with our product vision on an annual basis.
So to put this, you know, simply again, the way we've always approached our acquisitions is making sure that we have great products for each core pillar of a restaurant. Our view is that our products need to remain open, always open. We need to win on the basis of actually providing the best products. Best is something that gets determined on an annual basis by customers when they renew with you. And then lastly, our products truly do need to be better together. So again, we always view this either as, you know, puzzle pieces fitting together or core pillars. But our strong belief is if we on an annual basis prove this out, our customers will come to us and partner more with us on an extended basis. So there are three key parts I'll speak to today.
The first one is just an overview of what Operator Cloud actually is, the products, the problems that we're solving. Then we're going to move on and discuss Better Together. Why do we win? Why is this the special sauce? And then lastly, just contextualize the opportunity because we truly are, as Savneet mentioned, at day one. The opportunity remains really large. So the way we've thought about our products is less so focused on having individual products, point of sale, back of house, payments, but think about it more in terms of a solution. When we are engaging with a customer, we're trying to solve a variety of different problems, and we do so with a solution. I don't go and say, hey, I sell you Point- of-S ale and Data Central. I say, what are your problems? Here are the different modules I have to solve those problems.
Our solution works in restaurants. It works in casinos. It works in stadiums and on a global basis following the recent acquisition of TASK. What I am personally very, very proud of is that we've proven ourselves to be a growth enabler over time. So we've taken customers such as Cava, such as Sweetgreen, such as Slim Chickens, and grown them from tens of sites to hundreds of sites. And our ability to partner over time and demonstrate our value year over year- over- year is the reason why the largest brands, Burger King, Dairy Queen, Arby's, decide to do business with us. The other really important point here is that we truly are a technology partner, meaning that if we are demonstrating that we are providing real consultative value, they will come to us in each of their RFPs and look at our different products. That is unavoidable.
So this idea of studs up enterprise, what that really means for us is that when we launch a new functionality, that functionality needs to work again for the most demanding customers, customers that, you know, are operating across hundreds or thousands of stores. When you're talking about enterprise administration, for instance, that is much more complicated than it would be for someone operating two or three mom-and-pops. Entirely different game altogether. When you're talking about support, when you're talking about project management, when you're talking about installations, we've invested very, very heavily there to be able to meet the needs near instantaneously of our customers. If you are operating a Dairy Queen and your Dairy Queen restaurant goes down, we can get a field service agent there within four hours. That is a very deep moat that we've built out by always being studs up enterprise.
The numbers are always important to show, but really what this means for me is that every year we're adding five, six, seven thousand new sites across Operator Solutions. We have currently over 32,000 sites, but we're still incredibly robust in what we offer. Our uptime is industry leading, 99.99%. We're handling over a billion API calls each and every month, and we're still doing monthly releases. If you look at the amount of features that are delivered in the market, PAR truly is industry leading. The reason that is really, really important to point out is that, of course, you can get other providers out there, other competitors that come to market with a new product that can release very quickly. Of course, that is unavoidable. But to do that at this kind of scale is very, very difficult.
Scalability, stability, innovation with those two items is truly a differentiator. So again, for us, the foundation begins with the product itself. Our architecture is where all of our investment has gone into from an R&D perspective, as well as innovating on top of that. Our architecture is modularized, meaning that we can be faster in our release cycle. Right? We've talked about how robust our products are, the uptime. You know, we've invested heavily in things like QA, also deployment cycles. We're able to quickly fix and patch issues as they arise. They're not tied to the larger releases. Right? For us, this really does demonstrate innovation at scale, stability, scalability. When we talk about being open, the reason this is such an important piece for us to flag is that we are not like some of the, you know, more recent examples of providing multi-products.
This is not a walled garden. We truly do believe we need to win because we are best across individual products. So we're partnered with over 300 different companies from the Operator Cloud perspective. And what this really affords us is that we can be consultants, technological consultants to our customers. We know what variation of different products will drive the best performance. That builds trust over time. When customers trust you, they buy more from you. It also gives us a really unique insight into where the market is moving, both in terms of who we should be targeting from an M&A perspective, as well as what new problems we should be tackling with our products. Shown here is just a quick view of what our product roadmap is. On an annual basis, we get together with our leading customers. We have a customer advisory board.
We do regular QBRs, and we field from them what are the key items you need tackled over the next 12 months, 24 months. Really, it does sync up with our wider vision for the products. We focus on making sure that our functionality stays best in class individually. We make sure that our APIs truly are robust, resilient, that they're able to get the most out of their wider ecosystem. Lastly, we always look at how we can improve the Better Together functionality. If you are owning two sides of an integration, you can always drive better results. That's really been our big learning. I wanted to give a quick view into what this actually looks like when we're talking about, hey, we have a solution versus we have individual products.
Data Central was a back of house company that we acquired a couple of years ago. Now when we are positioning Data Central, we look at it more as, hey, by combining our point-o f- sale functionality with some back of house functionality, we are able to offer you a single source of truth. I can show you in one place what is happening in store. I can show you what is happening with your payroll, what is happening with your vendors. I can really empower the general manager to, in real time, make better decisions. When we talk about frictionless, that is really what this means.
I will tell you right now, there are many different competitors in this market that, because they do not own both sides of the equation, point- of- sale functionality, back of house functionality, they will really struggle because this really is a secret sauce. Payments for us as well. You know, I mentioned moving beyond the cost driver to actually pushing this out as a revenue driver. When we're positioning payments, we do so again in a consultative way where we are empowering operators to actually drive more out of payments. For us, that really is data. So we do not force people to use a certain processor, to use a certain gift card. We actually give the choice back to the individual operators.
By doing so, we've really built up this natively built Payments engine where we've given concepts and operators the opportunity to come to the table with who they would most like to partner with across each stream. So again, we are not forcing anybody at the enterprise level to choose our payments offering. Instead, we are using this as a competitive advantage to give the data back to the operators, the GMs, to make better decisions. This is again very different than some of our competitors in the market, but we believe this speaks better to what PAR is. We're a technology partner, not a payments company. The recent acquisition of TASK is something I'm really excited about because TASK, as a business, really reflects what PAR is. TASK is a unified platform on a global basis that is tackling restaurants, stadiums, and casinos. The TASK offering is expansive.
Again, the view of TASK is I'm providing you a solution, not individual products, and you know, this is certainly something that is reflected in their numbers. It's also something that is reflected in their customer base. TASK has partnered with Starbucks. They've partnered with McDonald's, and they're able to handle mass volume. So innovation at scale is something that TASK is also able to achieve, and for us, what this really means is that TASK is able to push PAR to operate more on a global level. And again, this is something that really speaks to Savneet's consistency from an M&A perspective. We only go after best in class, and we only go after those products that actually expand our view of TAM. I wanted to now speak to the Better Together piece of things because, again, when we talk vendor spaghetti, this problem is real.
It's a very potent problem. This is caused by excess vendors. You see a lot of companies in the space talking about, hey, we have a great integration with company X or company Y. The reality is you can never have two separate companies that have as good of integrations as PAR does when we own both products. It is simply not possible. When we own both sides of an integration, we can make it frictionless, and we can also push out better ROI. This is also, you know, somewhat relevant when you consider those concepts, those large, large concepts that have decided in the past to build their own technology. There is no way that even if they are working towards something that is less frictionless to them, that they will actually remain best- in- class with their tech stack.
That is the big differentiator between PAR and any other company in this space. Something that I think is really important as well to distinguish on the Operator Cloud side is that sales, specifically on the point- of- sale functionality, back of house functionality, it can take a long time to get a contract completed. It is because these operators, these concepts are smart, and they understand that once you partner with a technology provider, that technology provider needs to do right by you over an extended period of time. This is a really critical choice. These partnerships are highly durable. Once you roll out, there's no cap on how long this partnership can go, and Operator Solutions at PAR have never churned a tier one customer. Our ability to, you know, actually show performance results over time is what allows us then to expand.
When we think about solving operator spaghetti, vendor spaghetti, the first piece is for us just table stakes, minimizing complexity. Of course, if you're dealing with one single-threaded customer account rep, you will have a better experience than dealing with four or five. Of course, if you have one help desk number to call, you will have a better experience. When you have just one SLA across all your products, it's a better experience. But we're really focused on maximizing efficiency. Our products, when working together, drive better results. If I partner the point-of-sale functionality with a payments functionality, your throughput speed increases by three seconds, which means more dollars in the bank. Our data flow between the back-of-house functionality and our point-of-sale functionality is near real-time.
Industry average is more of 15-20 minutes, meaning that the general managers can make decisions on the fly faster, saving money or making money. And lastly, a very important differentiation as well is that if a customer of ours is buying three, four products at the same time and they want to roll out everything at the same time, we can actually do that. If you are a customer that is using four different vendors and expecting to roll everything at the same time, that is simply not feasible. And normally you need to make some trade-off in decisions. Do I go with company A first, company B, company C, etc.? When we speak innovation as well, I really did want to spend some time on Apple loyalty.
We have something called One Tap where if you take your iPhone and you go and pay with that iPhone, you don't even need the loyalty app of the concept that you're shopping at. You get immediately prompted via the Apple Wallet functionality basically to sign up. And what this truly does is it drives enhanced stickiness of that customer and ultimately higher throughput. Right? These are just the beginning items from a Better Together story that we're able to push forward. And, you know, we're also certainly working on expanding this functionality beyond just Apple to also Google. We are always asking prospective customers to do their due diligence, speak to our customers, our live customers, and talk to them. What is it like partnering with PAR? Where I'm very confident in is that customers like Smoothie King can really speak to the results that we've driven to them.
Smoothie King is a customer over 1,000 sites that partners across multiple different products, products that can save them money, products that can make them more money, but also we're able to do this quickly. For instance, when they transition to our payments offering, we could roll them out within a couple of months, and they're getting return on their investment, time to value of the products near instantaneously. The other distinction I just wanted to make is that, you know, while PAR is, of course, very proud of partnering with tier one companies, we were also built up with those SMBs that had growth aspirations. For us, our target is really 50 plus with the ability to scale quickly. That's true of our engagement with Cousins Subs or Salsarita's.
In both cases, across multiple products, we're dealing with their most pressing challenges, and we're able to meet those. So again, we are not effectively looking at only providing value to Tier 1s . We're doing it for growth concepts as well. And our ability to do that across multiple layers speaks to the quality of our operations. I wanted to end today speaking a little bit more about the flywheel. Savneet gave a quick view into what this looks like, and I wanted to take it from more the operator perspective. So, of course, the first piece is initial land. We win an RFP. We get in cycle with a specific product. We roll that product out. And then once we've landed and delivered outcomes, you have the next opportunity via the next RFP to engage again.
We've been able to do this across a couple of larger brands, as well as SMB brands, as well as the high growth brands. You know, recently with Burger King, it was an RFP that we are thrilled to win on the point- of- sale side. We've been able to expand beyond just point of sale to also partner with them on back of house. So, you know, we've already signed up various franchisees on the Data Central portfolio, and this is something that we're pushing forward with to expand more broadly within the RBI line. Separately, Yoshinoya. This is a concept where we initially entered into with our point- of- sale and Payments offering. By driving results there, we were able to get our online ordering product in, as well as our back of house functionality in.
Then lastly, Hooters, first going in with point- of- sale and our back of house offering, then expanding to payments. The reason I use these three examples is because the landing spot was different. We brought different products in, and then we're able to expand. So again, we are solving the problems that exist with the portfolio that we have. The opportunity to expand that portfolio to the wider products that we have will happen each and every time. The reason for that is that we truly can show the ROI of those products. So again, we truly believe that POS is the linchpin of a connected technology platform. Whether you are bringing the point of sale functionality together with online ordering or payments or loyalty, in every single instance, we can actually prove that our results are market leading. They're simply better together.
We really believe that the next step beyond just having those best integrations and providing what you've seen on the other page is something called our PAR Data Platform. Our view is that if I can give a customer a 300, or sorry, our customer, so an operator, a 360-degree view into their end customer, that enables that operator, that general manager, to really maximize the benefits they can derive out of their customer base. So, for instance, really understanding what are they most engaging with. You can move beyond this with AI as well to have dynamic pricing. You can do things such as pushing out inventory via loyalty that is ready to expire. But this really is what will be the bottle opener or can opener, if you will, to really tackling the most pressing white space that we have.
What you see on this chart is we have 250 concepts currently on Punchh that do not have any other PAR product. The reason for that is that Punchh has scaled enormously quickly. They're really one of our key expansion routes, and now our job is to make sure that we penetrate that large base. PAR Data Platform will be a great way to do that, and I'm really excited by the potential there. When we talk about day one, I think this slide encapsulates it better than anything else. Currently, the Operator Solutions products are in less than 10% of enterprise sites in the United States, and yet, if you look at our site growth, we're still growing on an annual basis for the last three years by 26%. Our ARPU every year over the last three years has grown by 10%.
Our churn rate over the last three years is always hovering between 5%-6%. And lastly, our very late-stage pipeline is greater than $30 million, meaning that for the next couple of years, not just next year, but the year after, the year after, we will be growing at a very quick clip within the Operator Solutions business. So to summarize here, really four key points that I'd like everybody to walk away with. The first one is this idea of it just works. Our ability to do things from the very outset at the top of the market and do so in a frictionless way really is a product advantage. Secondly, this idea of innovation at scale, it is a moat. Our products are resilient. They're stable. They're scalable. We're able to do new things every year despite adding thousands of sites.
That is not something that is easily replicated. That is very difficult to do. Thirdly, Better Together. That will be our cross-sell accelerator. That will be the way that we penetrate these Punchh sites. That is ultimately what takes us from, on the operator cloud side, near 10% penetration at 20%, 30%. And lastly, it's day one. I could not be more excited to be at PAR. Ultimately, the reason I joined was to join the growth story. And I'm really excited to really see what we've done since that day. So not only in terms of just growing the amount of ARR, but also adding truly talented people that live and breathe this company. And I think ultimately that is what will make us successful because the opportunity is there, but we have people that bleed this company and will take us there as well.
So with that, I'd like to pass things over to Joe Yetter, our GM of the Engagement Cloud business, also my first boss at PAR and the person that helped recruit me alongside Savneet. Joe, over to you.
Thanks, Oli.
Cool. So I'm Joe Yetter. I'm the General Manager of our Engagement Cloud division. Like Savneet said, five years ago, he convinced me to join this backwoods technology company in Upstate New York. After a lot of hard-fought negotiations and tears, I convinced my wife and family to move to New Hartford, New York, and on the first day on the job, we closed our first acquisition, and then for the first month, Savneet and I sleeping on couches, integrating this acquisition. We never stopped for the next five years, but even then, I'm still more excited about the next five years ahead of us than I am about the last five years. So let's jump in. Let's talk about the Engagement Cloud. In the Engagement Cloud, we're going to talk about three things: our products, our footprint.
We're going to talk about our secret sauce, why we win, why our product is so sticky, and then we're going to talk about that flywheel that Savneet mentioned, Oli talked a little bit more about, and how that applies to the Engagement Cloud product. Let's talk first about our footprint. We, in the Engagement Cloud, work with digital technology teams. Now, in restaurants, restaurant brands are generally divided now between IT technology teams, digital marketing and digital technology teams, marketing, operations, finance, and so on. We work with digital technology teams with the most powerful and creative brands out there, the biggest of the big, the power users of digital marketing teams. And we do that in four ways: a flexible digital platform, enterprise scale, partnerships that help them drive outcomes, and Better Together innovation.
Now, with those digital teams, we work in a variety of ways: loyalty and offers, mobile app, CPG offers, online ordering. And we do that in three different industries: restaurant, convenience, and fuel, and global solutions with our three flagship products, PAR Punchh, PAR Retail, and newly PAR Plexure. Today, we are the number one engagement software company in food service across the world with over 100,000 locations, 30 of the top 50 restaurant brands, 8 of the top 30 convenience and fuel brands, and tons of marquee logos everywhere from Wendy's to Chevron to Marathon. We have, one of the fun stats, 500 million people in the world are a member of one of our loyalty programs. So we have a very, very powerful market share. And we see that only growing, and we see the importance of digital engagement only growing.
Every year, digital sales continue to grow in food service retail. The brands that have really strong engagement strategies far outperform those that don't. That's a little bit about where we are and what our position is. What's our secret sauce? Why do we win? How do we continue to add new brands? We work with digital marketers. This is a fun example, Digital Diane, but we work with the digital marketer, and they have a very similar problem to their IT counterpart. They have to integrate complex vendors and complex solutions. They have to do that seamlessly in real time, and they have to drive ROI with attracting, retaining, bringing back their consumers.
But more importantly, I think today, if you look across the room, I would venture to bet that everybody in this room is a member of a hotel loyalty program, an airline's loyalty program. And I'll bet you most people here have at least one restaurant loyalty program on their phone, probably not yet convenience and fuel, but soon. And that's the challenge we have today, where loyalty, digital engagement, digital ordering, online ordering is a saturated market. And the key with the best brands and the biggest brands in the world is how do you stand out? How do you do something that's different to engage and connect to your consumers to drive more revenue? And we work in what we call creative engagement.
We power creativity with the biggest brands in the world in four different ways: the most flexible and configurable platforms in their industries, enterprise scale, proven enterprise scale, services that drive outcomes, and then Better Together innovation. Those are the four ways that we help drive creativity with the biggest brands in the world. We start with our end-to-end platform, everything from e-commerce and online ordering to loyalty and offer management to CRM and segmentation, all the way to CPG and funded offers. This is our end-to-end platform that we serve. When you go to a store today, your experience with that brand is how nice are the employees? How much do they interact with you? Are they smiling? Are they giving you fresh food? But online, your perception of the brand is their website, their mobile app, the kiosk. How easy is it to use?
How recognizable is their brand? How does it come through? We, at the very start, power all of these interfaces in an easy-to-use customization center. We tie that with integrated APIs with our PAR Ordering solution, all the way from third-party channels to online to kiosk. We're able to tag the loyalty members in each of those orders and manage the menu in one dashboard. Now, with that, we're able to create a 360 view of each consumer from everything from where they ate, what their favorite item was, which channels are they more likely to open, marketing communication, email, push notification, text. We do this to create the most powerful segmentation engines in each of the respective industries.
An agnostic multi-industry CDP or CRM is not going to be as powerful because we have the bespoke events for a restaurant, for a convenience and fuel retailer that we're able to create the most powerful engines. And with that, we can create very powerful campaigns and digital offers journeys. As an example, let's just say my favorite food was the Dave's Famous burger from Wendy's, and my most common add-on was a Frosty. We could create an automated journey to target me for a free Frosty specifically on my birthday with my favorite menu item in my favorite store directly with the channel that I'm most likely to open at the time I'm most likely to open it. And we can do that in an automated way. We have AI tools designed specifically for send time optimization and channel optimization. This is where we stand out from the crowd.
But this is what loyalty looks like today. This is what digital engagement looks like today. And we're constantly thinking about what is it going to look like tomorrow. And what it's going to look like tomorrow is everything from discounts all the way to building emotional connections with your consumers, with your guests. And that's where our platform stands out. We do everything, the most robust offers engine, everything on the left-hand side. But also, we create programs where you can donate your points to charities. You can have a gamified challenges where you order every sauce and you unlock a new loyalty tier and get free swag. So these are the types of innovation that we're going down. And also, we're looking at new ways for consumers to engage with stores and order from stores.
Traditionally, when you think about online ordering or digital engagement or loyalty, you think of a mobile app, downloading a mobile app, joining the program. But that's what yesterday used to look like. In the future, it's going to be app-less. It's going to be multi-channel. And that's where we're partnering very closely with Apple to create app-less engagement programs. In fact, our last customer advisory board that Oli mentioned was at the Apple headquarters just to show the tight partnership we have with them in inventing app-less and creating app-less experiences. Now, in sum, why do we win? Why do we win new logos? Why is our platform so powerful? We have the most configurable and flexible platforms, digital engagement platforms out there, which allows us to create a unique strategy with all of the top brands and all of the most creative brands out there.
And we do that at the highest scale. Proof is in the pudding. Over 100,000 locations, over 30 of the top 50 brands. We do this at the highest level of scale of anybody out there. That's why we win. But why we're so sticky is because we do the most complex and sophisticated implementations in the industry. These are five or six examples of multi-thousand location brands. And the implementations we have are very sophisticated. They're very complex. We're the only ones in the industry that can do this level of integrated solutioning with our customers to create a unique strategy with those brands. And of course, all of that is to drive outcomes for them: more sign-ups, more digital sales, higher frequency, higher average checks, all to drive the results for the brands. That's a little bit about our secret sauce, why we win.
I wanted to change gears now and talk about that flywheel, the flywheel that Savneet talked about briefly, and he's going to talk more about later, the flywheel that Oli talked about in the Operator Cloud and how does that look for the Engagement Cloud. Really, that comes to life in five different ways for the Engagement Cloud. One, we have a market-leading customer base today. Two, we're going to leverage that to continue to cross-sell PAR products. We're going to continue to invest in Better Together innovation. We're going to look for more M&A in the digital space and elsewhere. And then finally, we're going to continue to explore new industries of food service and adjacent food service verticals. That's how the flywheel comes to life. But the top of that is about winning new customers and onboarding new customers.
Just in the last 12 months, we've proven out that the Engagement Cloud continues to be an acquisition funnel for the rest of PAR with 13,000 restaurant brands, restaurant-only restaurant brands onboarded in the last 12 months with over 50 enterprise logos and three marquee Tier 1 logos just in the last 12 months. We're complementing that with continued investment to keep our products best in class and to invest in Better Together innovation. For example, our PAR Data Platform, which Steven Berkovitz is going to talk more about, our AI-powered ordering with our integration of PAR Punchh and PAR Ordering, our end-to-end digital payments, and our Apple and Android functionality. Now, I want to call out one of these, specifically the wallet functionality, end-to-end payment wallet functionality. In this, I'm sure most people here have heard of or have experienced the Starbucks loyalty program, the mobile app.
With this functionality, we're making that out of the box for all of our customers to be able to leverage this. If you're using PAR Punchh, PAR Payments, and PAR POS, this is a functionality that allows them to unlock that same experience of the top brands out there like a Starbucks, like a Panera that allow us to have seamless experiences. Now, when we put all that together, what's really exciting to us, and Oli showed the same slide, is that there are over 250 PAR Punchh brands, and less than 50% of them use another product of PAR. We think this is a huge runway for us and huge potential. We've proven out with examples that when we can add more than one product, not only does the PAR ARPU and the PAR revenue grow, but we drive really amazing results for our customers.
These are two examples from this previous slide. The previous slide was examples of our ARPU for customers that use one, two, three, four, five products, and these are the results: higher digital sales, more sign-ups, more users for that better together innovation with AI-powered ordering, with the wallets, and better cross-selling. Now, taking a side step and talking about our convenience and fuel. Twelve months ago, Savneet and I were looking at the numbers, and 10% of our revenue in the Engagement Cloud was coming from the convenience and fuel space, and it was our fastest-growing revenue sector of the division. When we really started to talk about it, we said, "Should we invest in this and continue to grow it, or is this a distraction?
Is this a distraction from our core, which was restaurants, which is restaurants?" And we started to dig into a little bit more of the industry and found some interesting stats. First, a pretty significant portion of the convenience and fuel site revenue is already coming from freshly prepared food. And it's the fastest-growing part of their revenue between gas and retail and food service. Food service was the fastest-growing. In fact, the CAGR is faster than the restaurant industry, which means they're stealing share from restaurants in freshly prepared food. On top of that, the problems that the retailer faces in the convenience space are the same as the restaurant. They're having difficulty managing multiple vendors, tying together data, and then building a digital engagement strategy that stands out from the crowd.
On top of that, when you really look at the macro of the convenience and fuel space, it's an amazing industry. 150,000 locations in just the U.S. This unit economics of a convenience store versus a restaurant is much more favorable, and they're at the very beginning of the digital journey. There's a saying in the convenience space that C- stores are five years behind restaurants, which we think is an amazing place to be. For PAR, that means that we're one of the early, early strategic companies to enter into that space and help that digital adoption. Now, I'm sure everybody here has been a consumer of all types of restaurants, from QSR, full service, fine dining. You've probably visited all types of restaurants. But in convenience, it's slightly different, and the industry is much more fragmented.
I want to do a quick convenience C- store 101 for the group. We look at C- stores, and they're really divided into two different businesses. There's the forecourt, which are the pumps, and there's the backcourt, which is the retailers. We think about these as two distinct businesses. In many cases, those are owned by two different types of companies. There's major energy companies. Think about Exxon and Chevron and Shell. Then there's the backcourt, the retailers. Those are the 7-Elevens of the world. Now, in these specific sites, there's many iterations of how they can work together. There's a branded site, which has a major energy logo out on the pumps, and then a separate one on the retailer retail site. Think about an Exxon 7-Eleven. That would be a branded site. Or there's company-owned and company-operated. We call these Co-Cos.
These are for brands or retailers that want to own more of their brand, the more premium brands: Wawa's, Casey's, Circle K's, CEFCO's. These are the ones that want to own more of the retail site. And there's many different iterations. Now, after learning all of this about the industry and seeing where it was in that digital journey and the food service journey, we decided to go all in and make the acquisition of Stuzo earlier this year. With that, overnight, we became the number one engagement platform and engagement company in the industry with over 25,000 locations and some real marquee logos from Marathon, Casey's, RaceTrac, and the like. Now, what's more, we're the only company in the industry that can serve both of those constituents, both of those companies and stakeholders in a single site well.
We work with major energy companies on the forecourt as well as retailers on the backcourt. And we do this seamlessly to drive results for them. This is powered from an end-to-end platform with loyalty and offers, mobile app, our white glove program management, payments, integrated payments, CPG funding, and then on-site engagement. Now, since the acquisition, we're just getting started, and we're just accelerating that go-to-market motion. And we're still bringing more and more pipeline to the fold with three major brand wins in the last 12 months that we're excited to continue to accelerate and continue to see more and more brand acceleration from our C- store industry. But on top of that, we're executing the same playbook that we do in restaurants with Better T ogether innovation. And I wanted to call out two specific examples of that Better Together innovation, the first one being full-stack CPG offers.
We're the only vendor in the industry that can do this end-to-end at the level that we do with everything from getting and organizing the data, offering that to the CPG companies, creating the offers, age-verifying the users, and dishing those offers out on the app or other digital interfaces to those consumers and doing that in a full seamless stack. So much so that we have a special designation with Altria called Personalization P+. We're the only vendor in the industry that can do this end-to-end with that level. The second Better Together innovation example that I wanted to share was about our payments. Now, restaurants is a little different. Online ordering, setting up payments for online ordering is pretty straightforward. In convenience and fuel, it's a little bit more regulated and has specific requirements to actually integrate to the pump.
I bet you if we did a survey, the amount of people here who have paid for gasoline through an app on their phone to unlock the pump, there's probably less than 5% of the room have actually paid for the pump and unlocked it because that requires a special connection called an MPPA, Mobile Payment Processing Application. There's only three companies in the industry that can do this, and we're one of the three, and that obviously leads to a huge cross-sell opportunity and innovation opportunity with PAR Pay and our wallet functionality, so unlocking a pump digitally, paying through a store digitally is a unique functionality that we're bringing to the table in convenience and fuel, but that's just the beginning.
Even though our ARPU is just under 2,000, 2,000 a year, we think there's huge opportunity to continue to grow, double, triple, and quadruple this over the years. Now, we're not only thinking about Better Together innovation within the industry. We're also zooming out and saying, "How can we build Better Together innovation across these different platforms within restaurant, convenience and fuel, and then an other food service, global food service?" With our PAR Data Platform, Steven Berkovitz is going to talk a little bit more about that in the next section. So I'll sum up with this. If there's a few things you need to take away from the Engagement Cloud, we have a market-leading position. We have over 100,000 locations, hundreds of marquee brands.
We're continuing to add new logos to that mix at the highest rate in the industry, and we're continuing to invest in Better Together innovation and M&A. We're going to keep doing that and keep turning that PAR flywheel while we explore new industries to double down on that growth and help find future land and expand opportunities. I want to say thanks for the time today. With that, I'm going to introduce Steven Berkovitz, our CTO. Before I do, I wanted to just tell a quick story about Berk. When he joined four years ago, Brink was the victim of its own success. We had won a lot of customers and then going through those scaling pains. Berk, like the wolf in Pulp Fiction, came in to help scale that solution up to meet the needs of our customers.
Then two years later, helped dive into the Punchh to help mature that technical architecture as well and continue to evolve so that we could keep growing. With that, I will pass it over to Steve. I think every good technology company, every good vertical SaaS company needs a CTO wizard. This is Steve, our CTO wizard.
Thank you, Joe. Oh, I get applause. As Joe said, I've been with the company for four years now. I did have a blacker beard and thicker hair when I joined, but hey. Anyway, I joined under the guise of the mandate to really scale out our R&D function, improve efficiency, and most importantly, help us build enterprise-grade products. Today, I'm going to cover a little bit of an overview of the PAR R&D organization. I'll talk a bit about how we've transformed it and scaled it over the last couple of years, and I'll wrap up talking about AI and some innovation projects that we're working on. Just a bit of a glance to our R&D organization today. We build and support seven different SaaS products. We're doing this right now across three different key R&D regions, and I'll show you those in a few moments.
Our R&D organization today is over 550 people strong. This includes our engineers, our quality assurance, our quality engineers, DevOps, network operations center, security, and the likes. To speak to some of the scale and maturity of what we've done, our Punchh product frequently handles over 400x instantaneous loads. This happens from big drop events from our customers. In 2022 alone, our Punchh product saw 4x growth of many of its key usage components, so a lot of scaling happening in that product. The PAR point of sale device software has deployed almost 250,000 hardware devices out in the field. In one of, what I think is one of our most impactful outcomes this year, we removed $5 million of our hosting costs.
And again, to speak to the type of scale that our team and products can handle, this is Super Bowl from this year. In just a matter of hours, our product is able to interact with 60 million guests, drove $11.2 million transactions, and almost a $250 million worth of sales flowed through our system in just a matter of hours. So how have we done this? What is our philosophy to our R&D? First, you heard from Joe and Oli about our business units. R&D is one of our remaining central functions, and we've centralized it to provide the best economies of scale to various business units. Every one of our products has an owner, and every one of our regions has an owner. This goes to our ownership value.
The reason why we do this is I really believe that our products work together when the people who build them also work together. It's really hard to do when people are not well connected. We've seen time and time again that we solve problems faster when our teams are well connected. Of course, we leverage our scale to obtain the best pricing and service from our vendors wherever possible. Next, I'll talk a little bit about our transformation. We're following a bit of a playbook, so to speak. First, as I mentioned, we centralize all of our teams with one org and one set of goals. We're consolidating vendors to negotiate pricing. Most importantly, I think we've invested very significantly in our software architecture to reduce our hosting costs, improve performance, and reliability. We are significantly leveraging offshore offices.
Over half of our team is now based offshore. This year has been a big focus on our developer efficiency and productivity with AI and automation. Every single PAR product today has fewer employees than any other year, and we are delivering more than ever. The productivity has remained the same, if not increased, and we are doing a lot more with less. Of course, we are looking to acquire complementary products and services and integrate them into our department. Our global engineering centers today are based in North America. We have an office in Toronto and San Diego. In India, we have two offices in Gurugram and Jaipur. The Jaipur office we got when we acquired Punchh, and we've since run out of space there and expanded into Gurugram.
Of course, as we've grown with all these acquisitions, our technical capabilities have grown a lot too. As you can see, we've brought in different products, a wide variety of tools and technologies. We've consolidated vendors in the platforms only in cases where the outcome was an improved product or guest experience. Just to highlight some of the efficiency work we've done this year, on the hosting cost aside, our Cost-Aware Autoscaling played a really significant role in the hosting cost improvement this year. Not only does our system dynamically scale up to the largest events, like those 400x events I spoke of, we leveraged our service level objectives as well as other indicators to optimize the cost to serve. We've invested in optimizing and consolidating our data platform, and you heard from Joe and Oli about the PAR Data Platform.
I'll show you a bit of that in a second, and we have reinvested in re-architecting the costliest services of our products. On the reliability and performance side, we've taken a feature-by-feature, API-by-API approach to improve the performance of the most problematic areas of our product. Our teams are entirely service level objective focused. This is a big part of what I've brought to the team. We look at these all day. It's part of our culture. It's how we make sure that when we tell a customer that email goes out in a minute, it goes out in a minute. It's how we say your API is going to respond. It's going to respond. We live and die by these every single day.
We invested a lot in self-healing and automation because things don't always go to plan, but when they do, we want things to recover quickly and with the least amount of human involvement. On the people and process side, we've internalized all of our network operations center functions into a shared multi-product team that we now serve globally. We do this all with follow-the-sun and 24/7 coverage of our global teams. I think I've mentioned a couple of times, but we've also centralized all of our data engineering into one group.
When I first joined PAR, one of the first things that came to me and asked me was, "How are we going to measure return on invested capital in the product?" Followed by, "You need to be our number one capital allocator." And how we've chosen to look at this is by breaking it down by these categories: tech debt, integrations, feature development, and production support. And what I think is really amazing is that over the last number of years, our investment in the architecture and the technical debt has really paid off, and we've been able to shift this focus back to our feature development. So as of our last quarter, we're now spending 62% of our time working on features. Previous years, this was a lot lower. We spent a lot more time on the integrations, on the technical debt, and of course, on production support.
On our point-of-sale product, the feature development continues to be the big focus in order to win the new customers. And this comes after really burning down our technical debt during 2021 and 2022. Our next-gen architecture for our point-of-sale is complete. It is tested. It is being rolled out currently in the later part of this year and into next year. On the Punchh product, we've driven down production support and reinvested all that time back into feature development. Our retail product, again, continues to improve the amount of time it spends on feature development. It's done so by reducing the amount of time it takes to onboard new customers. And our ordering product remains focused on core feature development to close the gaps with our legacy competitors and make sure it's ready for the U.S. market.
Next, I'll talk a little bit about what we're doing at AI at PAR because you can't have a presentation today without talking about AI. I'm a big believer in AI-assisted development. So this is products like GitHub Copilot, Amazon Q that are focused on developer productivity. Today, over 40% of our team and growing every month are using these tools. This lets us bring almost 1,000 lines of code in per day into our products that is AI-generated. Our teams are seeing about 40,000 suggestions per month from these products, and we have about a 33% accept rate. So one-third of all the AI suggestions are coming in, and this is generating about 1,000 lines of code for us per day. It's about 10 times how much a single person can write on a really good day.
What I think is really awesome, we do this all with a tooling cost less than a single North American head. So not a huge investment, but we are getting really great results here. On our Punchh product, we've invested in making sure that our test cases can be all AI-generated. 100% of our features now include AI-generated tests, and this has let us spend a lot less time on the base-level test and a lot more time in the investment on the automation and the end-to-end user flows. We do this with some off-the-shelf products. Of course, we have Jira and Confluence, and we leverage ChatGPT to plug this all together and build out our test cases. I wanted to highlight a couple of AI features we have here at PAR.
Our item recommendation service brings in all kinds of information from your guests from our various products in order to provide recommendations. In some early pilots of this product, we saw a 70% improvement compared to our competitors, so really quite significant. This is a shared service, and we have it rolled out to all of our products. You heard about Send-Time Optimization earlier. Send-time optimization makes sure that you interact with your guests when they're most likely to interact back with you on a message-by-message or push notification-by-push notification. We figure out the best time to send to the guest on a personalized level to make sure that you will engage back. Our Feedback Autoresponder provides recommendations and optionally automatically responds to your guests. This saves a lot of time for our customer support teams and our brand's customer support teams.
Our Smart S egments feature takes all the guesswork of how to create segments that target your guests. Automatically leveraging frequency, recency, and monetary spend, we create segments that are designed to maximize your spend and your guest visitor frequency. Last but not least, the PAR Data Platform. You've heard this. This is a big investment for us in the coming years, and it's really key for us under the guise of winning together to bring all of our products and best together to bring all of our product data to a single place. Today, we're storing this all in Databricks as our centralized data lake software. And this is what we're now leveraging to power all the analytics, data sharing, and of course, our AI capabilities. I do want to talk a little bit more about data sharing. You've heard the term enterprise.
We never want to be the platform where data goes to die. Our customers expect to own their data. They expect to have access to data, and we expect them to use their data in their operations too. And PAR will never be the place that you don't get access to your data. So we have all kinds of tools and products to make sure that we can deliver your data to you efficiently, that you own it. We will use it to provide great analytics, great AI, and other capabilities, but most fundamentally, we believe the data belongs to the customer. Anyways, with that, that wraps up my section on R&D. I'm going to hand it back over to Chris. Thank you, Chris.
So we've reached the intermission portion of the presentation. We'll take a good 20-minute break. Please make yourself available to the demos in the lobby.
There's some refreshments. Stretch your legs. For those participating virtually, we will be back online at 2:45 P.M. Eastern Time with a hard start, and we'll finish up the presentation and then end with Q&A, so thanks, everybody, to this point, and we'll be back in 20 minutes.
Okay, hope everyone can take their seats. We're about to restart. Okay, thanks everyone. I think we're ready to proceed with the second part of our presentation. Now I'd like to have Savneet come back on stage and kind of give a deep dive on our go-to-market muscle, and then Bryan will come up with an analysis of our financials, and then we'll move to Q&A. So without any further delay, Savneet.
Thanks, Chris. So I'm going to walk through our go-to-market, but really spend more time on our TAM and sort of putting it into numbers where we think we're going to go from here. So we sell broadly in two buckets: Tier 1 and Tier 2 enterprises. These are food service companies that generally are RFP-driven. They usually have a consultant helping them get through a process. That consultant can be a restaurant or a convenience-specific consultant, or it can be Deloitte or Accenture. These are 6 to 12-month sales cycles, heavy, heavy focus on proof of concept, proof of value, and then we aid our AEs with presales engineers like Trevor and Anshul in the back. We give them TAMs. We give them CSMs, a traditional enterprise software sale. The second bucket of customers are our Tier 3 customers.
And these are customers that I think have visions of becoming Tier 1 customers, so they want the same functionality, but they need it in a simple packaging. They need a simple contract. They need easy access to the product. They need implementation to be a little standardized, and oftentimes, if you do this right, you can scale with them over time so that you're not having to rip and replace every single time, and we look at our go-to-market with a similar flywheel to the product flywheel you saw earlier. We, as always, try to land with one of our hero products, which is either PAR POS or Punchh, and if we do a great job with that first product, we get to cross-sell the second product and the better-together experience.
Again, convincing our customers that buying that second product from PAR gives them a better outcome than having two different vendors. And as Oli and Joe mentioned, this idea is very powerful because they're living through that vendor spaghetti today of trying to connect all these different products. But when you have two own solutions, you can help control that experience and deliver the solution the customer needs as opposed to hoping two vendors can make it happen for you. Now, if we're successful in selling that second product, we then have what we like to call scaled economics. We've now sold you two products from the exact same OpEx base, allowing us to have higher margin and reinvest that back into our products, thereby creating better products. And that creates happier and stickier customers.
The key part here is that we've learned over time that as we add additional products to each customer, we can expand the LTV longer and longer and longer. It gives us a great, great roadmap to raise price, sell more product, and use them as a reference customer, and hopefully come back with another hero product, whether that be a built or an acquired product down the road. Once we've kind of proven that happy and sticky customer, you take more market share, you have more resources to go back to market, and it then becomes very, very hard for these single product solutions to come in and disintermediate you. It's a little bit like the Teams versus Zoom.
Once you're the platform, it's pretty hard to just have somebody else convince you and say, "I have a few bells and whistles the other guys don't." Because again, the platform wins and innovation at scale is what's driving our success. We think our flywheel is different. People talk about flywheels. We think ours is particularly different because we have bets on the products. As always, our products are best in class, and that really wins the day with our customers. We cannot go in with the second or third best product. It just doesn't work in enterprise software. You can't win through great sales. You win through great products. And so while most people have a flywheel where they bundle and bundle and bundle and you're sacrificing functionality all the way down, we're the opposite.
We think as you add every product, you get more functionality, more outcomes that you couldn't get without us. We think that with our products we sell, the values are substantiated every single year. You don't need to question, "Did it work? Did it not?" We can prove the ROI every single time we meet with you. And that's really hard. It really kind of increases our ability to stay sticky and grow for the long run. We've delivered great growth. And if you go back and exclude the pandemic year, it's 20% for many, many years. And as you heard earlier, we have a ton of white space. And this is probably the thing we're most excited about, is that even if we never sign another customer, we've got a growth runway for a very long time. So let's see how we've done.
So first on kind of planting our flag with those hero products. On the Operator Cloud side, we've CAGR 26% of new sites every single year for the last, call it, three or four years, and 31% in the Engagement Cloud when aided by M&A. And you can see we're planting that hero product so that we can create flywheels in each one of those customer sites over time. And then if you sort of look at how we've done at sort of that cross-sell, well, in the Operator Cloud side, we've grown on average 10% a year. We're CAGR 10% a year in per-site economics, meaning every store is buying on a same-store sales basis, 10% CAGR-ing over time. And on the Engagement Cloud, it's 4%. So we're landing on more sites and then selling more to those sites every single year.
And that's led to this great financial performance of Operator Cloud predominantly growing organically at 44% and Engagement Cloud going at 55%, again, aided by M&A. And I think this is really powerful because now we can not only get to grow through new acquisition, we get through new product, and then the ability to drive price over time as we have more products. I think the best way to show this is a couple of customer examples. Unfortunately, we couldn't show the logos because it would take too long to get approval. But this is a really amazing chart. These are two of our big brands. You guys would all know the names here. The one on the left is one of our oldest and largest Brink customers. And we started out with Brink in 2019, and we were later able to upsell them Data Central in 2020.
They were able to buy Punchh after that. And you can see that we got this incredible growth from a customer that was $2 million a year all the way up to $14 million or $15 million a year. Now, some of this is aided by the growth and them rolling out Brink and Data Central. But it's so powerful. Now imagine this customer saying, "You know what? I don't pretend they have an issue with Punchh or with Brink or whatever." How are they going to churn? They've got three products deeply integrated. They have one QBR. They have one person to PAR, one throat to choke. Do they really want to go to their franchisees and say, "Hey, we're going to split this up and have three vendors, and we're going to..." It just gets harder and harder. The brand on the right is a 1,400-store chain.
Again, you will know the chain here. They start out with Brink, then they added Data Central, then we upsold them on Payments and later on Punchh. And you can see the tremendous growth in revenue, and you can see Payments has just created huge velocity of growth here. So we're seeing really, really, really strong growth within individual customers as they add more and more products. And what's cool about these brands is these aren't like a rinky-dink brand. These are both multi-unit thousands of stores. So the flywheel doesn't work just in the down market, as you've seen with these amazing businesses like Toast and Square. It works in the up market too. And so I think this is really, really encouraging and exciting. Now, the second kind of secular tailwind we have is that when we sell to these non-mega brands, we're selling to these fast-growing brands.
And these are two also amazing brands whose logos I couldn't show here, but you can guess where they are. Fast-growing chains. They're all over the cities you're all around. And this is the growth of their business with PAR on a new site basis. So we haven't upsold them on a product. They're growing by adding net new sites. And what's powerful here is that every new store they open, it automatically starts day one with a PAR stack. So one of these customers has two products. I think the other one has one or two products as well. And so every time they add a store, it's PAR, PAR, PAR, PAR, PAR. And so we have this great secular tailwind, and then we've won these fast-growing brands that everyone knows.
We have this perfect pool of the mega enterprises plus the emerging enterprise, and it has created this immense durability and growth. The combination of these two has led to us now being in 50% of the top 20 brands in the United States, and this was up 5x from 2018. The execution on that flywheel is really coming forward, and we have got these other tailwinds behind us. Moving to the math. Today, we assume very, very conservatively that if a restaurant customer, restaurant only, bought all of our suite, it is about $10,000 per store. As you heard, we have got about 120,000 sites across PAR. The white space there is about $1 billion. If all those customers who have not bought all of our products yet buy the rest of our products, it is about $1 billion right in front of us.
If we assume that we sell to the rest of the restaurant category, there's another, call it, $4 billion of opportunity. Those are big numbers. Let me break it down into pieces. This is a build-up of our ARPU and then the restaurant space. Point- of- sale, I have priced here at $2,500. Now, before everybody starts yelling, yes, we sell this for a lot more today. When we started at PAR, this number was $1,800 or $1,900 per store. Today, as we talked about earlier, Burger King is priced at well over $3,000. We've moved this price up meaningfully over time. But conservatively, I'm assuming this is $2,500. But again, Oli and the team are not quoting this at $2,500. If we're able to upsell you payments, we take your ARPU up $4,000. Now, you may ask, why is that high?
When we sell you Payments, it's an incredible offering because we're selling you gateway. We're selling you auth, fraud, and processing, and if we're lucky, we'll sell you off-premise or above-store processing as well through MENU or Punchh, and so Payments is a huge driver of ARPU, and the beauty is there's no new salesperson. There's no new ops. There's no new service, then we try to sell you Data Central. Data Central is about $1,800 per store, and again, leveraging the exact same sales team, so those first three products, it is one salesperson that's been selling all of that work. It is one ops team. It is one support team, and so it's really cool to see that happen from one person, then we get you into the engagement side, and we try to sell you Punchh, and that's about $1,000 per store.
Later MENU, which is about $1,500 per store. You can see how we walk you all the way up to this $10,000 number. Now, let's look at C-Stores, our new vertical. Today we do loyalty. We price Open Commerce, the formerly Stuzo product, about $2,000 per store. We're launching payments in the next few months here. We're pricing it at $4,000. Again, we haven't done this before, but we're assuming it'll be something similar to restaurants, albeit it'll be in different parts and pieces. Then if we follow the same playbook as we have in restaurants, it'll end up being around $10,000 or $11,000 all over again. Now, we don't know if it's going to flow this way, but we're trying to run the same playbook over and over again. So maybe it'll be data management first. Maybe it'll be POS first.
But we're going to try to run the same playbook we've done in restaurants because, as Joe mentioned, it's the exact same challenges, the exact same problems that they see today. And the go-to-market opportunities are plentiful in that we can cross-sell, upsell. We have international expansion. We have new verticals and customer reference. But what I think is more relevant is, what if we just narrowed all that data I just showed you to the United States? So in the U.S., there are about 400,000 enterprise restaurants. And these are what we call our serviceable markets. Everybody likes to say there's millions of restaurants. But relevant to PAR, there's about 400,000 true restaurants that we can sell to. Of those, we think they're priced at around, if they bought all of our products, about $10,000.
Now, before I go forward, I would say the one metric in this entire presentation that you can bank on that is going to be a lot higher is this $10,000 number. When we started, like I said, this number was $1,800 or $1,900. Today, it's well over 10,000. This is going to grow and grow and grow as we build and launch new products. It's probably grown by 40% just since we launched Payments. And so you'll see incredible growth here as we build and acquire new products where we can push them through our system and pull this number up. And so that's what's so exciting is that a very conservative TAM in restaurants is about $4 billion. If you look at the convenience store space, there's about 150,000 enterprise sites, as Joe mentioned.
And we think that there's $10,000 or $11,000 of true ARPU there if all of our products were purchased. And you end up with about a TAM of about $5.5 billion. And so that's kind of how we look at our opportunity here in the United States. And so you can see we're $250 million today. We think we've got a long way to go. And one thing I should say before I completely contradict what I'm going to say is that we don't like slides that have hyperbole, which is like there's a $100,000 billion TAM. It's always made-up stuff. We try to make it very serviceable and say, "What is actually achievable?" And so as a team, we go out and say, "Okay, how many of those sites are actionable?
What's reasonable?" And for us, we really believe these are reasonable outcomes, particularly on the ARPU slide where we think we're being very generous. Now, the reason I said I'm going to conflict myself is if you want to see the gigantic big numbers, which again aren't really to bank on, you can see there's $4 billion for restaurants, $1.7 billion in C-stores, and $42 billion in international. Now, we'll see where that goes over time. We're just getting started in that market. But there's just such tremendous opportunity. We obviously have maybe the two most marquee customers already through the TASK and Plexure platform. And if you haven't seen the demo that Trevor's doing, it's pretty badass. So take a look, and you can see why we're winning. But there's just a lot of room to run.
And as I said, what gets us excited is we can grow without ever signing a customer for years to come because we can work this cross-sell motion over and over. And we really did just unlock this in the last 12 months when we really kind of said, "Wow, we've figured out the flywheel." So to summarize before I give it to Bryan, our flywheel is working. It's accelerating. People keep asking why I'm so excited about Data Central. The reason why it's our fastest-growing pipeline is because we unlocked that Better Together innovation, which is allowing Data Central reporting to be in Brink so you don't have to go to two different products. Now you've got one that does the reporting of two. And then by doing that, we can then accelerate the go-to-market motion.
As a result, we have more pipeline in Data Central than we've ever had. It'll be one of our fastest-growing products for the next couple of years because we did that unlock. And all of a sudden, we're like, "Let's do that again." Number two, our white space is very large. You've seen it in Joe's slide, Oli's slide, my slides. We have a long way to go before we penetrate our white space. And normally, I'm a little bit conservative when people say, "Everyone's going to buy your products." And I'm like, "I don't think so." The one thing I can tell you is that it's going to be more than I ever expected.
We're just seeing that the thesis we thought, which is this idea that restaurants and retailers were being eaten by software and they would want a platform versus all these different vendors is coming true right in front of our eyes. This cross-sell is not only accelerating sales, but also really lowering churn. So in a world where restaurants are facing challenges, our churn rate is flat and probably getting better over time. And I think what's lost in that is that as you add each additional product, you lower churn, increase LTV, not just because it's stickier and they're there longer, but it gives you the ability to raise price more because it's very hard to sort of churn individual product if you've got three sets of modules that are integrated into each other. And so your levers to create value over time increase, don't decrease.
The ARPU here is going to expand. We have taken up Brink's price by the teens every single year. We'll continue to do that. And so that $10,000 number will just expand and expand and expand over time. And then lastly, while the international market is meaningfully larger and we're just figuring it out today, the U.S. has plenty for us to grow, and we feel really confident that we've got years of growth in front of us just executing on our core strategy today. So with that, Bryan's going to go run through the numbers, and then we'll come back for Q&A and get everybody on their way home.
Thank you. Great. Thank you, Savneet, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm Bryan Menar, PAR's Chief Financial Officer. And it's an actual pleasure to be here today. As all the guys have said, it's a pleasure for us to be here to be presenting to you and also for all of you to be here not only physically, but also virtually, as many of you have actually been great partners of ours as we've gone through this transformation that we've been explaining to you today. Today, I'll be going over a couple of different topics, kind of explaining out how do we think about capital allocation, what's our methodology, and how we go through it. I'll discuss a little bit more about the financial transformation that we've been experiencing and executing too, and then provide some details on our recent financial results over the past 12 months.
Starting with capital allocation, capital allocation to us is more than thinking about various different M&A opportunities. We take a more holistic approach. We really consider the buy versus build opportunities in each of the scenarios and how that sequences into our long-term strategy timeline. First off, as you can see, we are very proud of the platform that we have today and the portfolio products that we have. As such, our first number one priority from an investment perspective is to make sure that we maintain the best-in-class product status that we have, in addition to make sure that our platform continues to deliver better together outcomes for our customers. We also understand that there are other products outside of PAR that could have actually even more value to our customers if they came within the PAR platform.
The explosion of the food service technology that Savneet was showing you earlier today, in addition to our expansive ecosystem that both Joe and Oli were going over with you earlier, puts us in a very unique position. Why is that? Well, because we have clear visibility to the technological capabilities that are out there driving value to the markets today. We also understand that the markets that we play in are experiencing generational disruption. So time is of the essence. And so we need to live one of our values. We need to continue to act with urgency. Leveraging our efficient M&A motion is and will continue to be one of our differentiators that will continue to enable us to expand TAM and respective market share. So then when we look at an actual target out there, or how do we actually think about going forward with M&A?
So we consider three main primary filters that you see here that enable the compounding returns over time. So first, from a broader perspective, we look at the markets. We prefer to play in markets that are going through transformational secular growth, where there's also fragmented competition and/or high barriers to entry that we know that we can capitalize on. Then we actually look at what are the target companies within those markets. We consider what kind of technologies do they have and products do they have. Do they actually have a competitive market position? And if so, would those actual products integrate well with our suite of products that we have so we can provide that Better Together solution for our customers and incremental value? We really take our time during the due diligence process to really look at certain areas. One of them is revenue visibility.
It is important that we really understand the true revenue visibility that's in there. We kick the tires on that, not just on what the trending numbers were from a QOE standpoint, but then also how we think about it going forward from a forecasting perspective. Another one is margin. We want to make sure there's strong margin performance. And/or is there opportunities for our team, as we know, who has already been able to execute this with our other products, to drive improvement, margin performance improvement on those products? Next, cultural fit. So as Savneet explained earlier in regards to going over our values, culture is paramount for us. We live and breathe that every day. So the last thing that we want to do is go into a situation where we're going to have some kind of post-acquisition cultural clash.
We actually spend some good quality time with the management teams of these companies to really understand what makes them tick. What is the culture they're actually trying to drive at that organization? We also spend time assessing the leadership team themselves. Very important for us to understand what's their passion, what's their experience, what's their expertise. And we're clear we have the uncomfortable conversations with them to align with them and also be transparent as to what their role would be in the company post-acquisition. Taking these first two filters, they become the main basis then for our valuation filter. Along with all the information that we're gathering from due diligence and analyses that we're doing, it actually starts laying out for us where there are specific areas of synergies between our two companies.
In addition, we also look for direct operational improvement areas that we know our operating team can actually drive on day one post-acquisition. And all of this analysis, what's always number one for us is to make sure we never lose focus on return on invested capital when we're going through this process. So as you can see, our capital allocation methodology is directly aligned to the strategy you guys have been hearing all day from everyone that's been speaking here. First for us is we've got to make sure we land and expand best-in-class products. And then when integrated appropriately, we are actually creating Better Together innovation. That actually truly is a PAR differentiator that will continue to drive sustained profitable growth for us as we go forward. So now to discuss a little bit about our financial transformation.
To summarize what you've heard from all the speakers today, our portfolio transformation and platform innovation has been providing significant value to our customers. And that value thesis is transient, we know, to other verticals. We're already seeing that today, what Joe went over earlier in regards to the retail vertical. And so this is resulting in massive long-term opportunity for us to feed our growth, what Savneet just went over as he discussed our go-to-market strategy. But I think the question then comes for anybody, well, then the question is, can we successfully execute? And I think it's important to actually bring the slide back up here that Savneet so eloquently went over earlier today because it really highlights for us the past six years, looking at our key financial metrics, how they have actually performed for us.
And I think it's really key to understand is our team has been executing to our strategy and to the transformation. If you think about it, 2018, we were a hardware-centric restaurant tech/government contracting company back in 2018, and now we are a pure-play food service technology company in 2018. One of those actual metrics that is on there is the ARR per share. I'm going to bring that up here again as well because if you look at this trending, it really, I think, reiterates how we've been able to demonstrate execution of driving accretive value when we're doing our capital allocation, both in our efficient top-line growth that you see here, in addition to our gross margin expansion. Subscription services is our key growth driver, make no bones about it. It's also our highest margin revenue type.
So we've been able to manage the subscription service margin accretion while also driving areas of growth such as in payments. The subscription service growth that you're seeing in both our revenue and our gross margin is directly driving the impressive margin accretion that you're seeing in our total consolidated gross margin over to the right. And our ability to consistently execute to our strategy, I think, is also reflecting the impressive trajectory of our shareholder return as you see here. During that period, each acquisition was not only financially accretive, but also integrated well into our platform. Our product and R&D teams were keenly focused on delivering integrations that were going to provide additional incremental value to our customers and ultimately to our shareholders.
As a result, we have significantly outpaced small mid-caps and SaaS companies as reflected in the comparison here to the Russell 2000 and the WCLD indices. We're not losing steam. Looking at that same comparison just over the past two years, as you can see, we continue to build momentum. Now, for our last topic here, we'll go over some recent financial results that we've had. Starting with the top, looking at ARR. Yes, our strategic inorganic growth has been enabled for us to double our ARR in just a year. We're also just as proud, if not prouder, of the 25% organic growth that we've also done. That's also going to continue to be a key growth driver for us going forward.
This growth is not only broad from an organic and inorganic perspective, but as you've heard today, it's also broad when thinking about the growth across our product lines. It's not just one product line that's driving this growth. And then looking at the current white space that both Joe and Oli, and in addition to Savneet recently went over, and our new logo pipeline, this is indicating to us that broad growth across our product lines will continue. So now moving down to gross margins. We have been uber-focused on driving accretive quarterly gross margins for subscription services. And in addition to the fact that we've been seeing the product mix shift to subscription service revenue, which now represents over 60% of our total revenue, has enabled us to be able to break that 50% threshold at our consolidated gross margin percentage in this past quarter.
We've been able to execute top-line growth and margin expansion, all while managing our operating expenses. We've driven this 25% organic growth while taking out $16 million in operating leverage. We've not done this by doing basic cuts or looking at limiting investments across the board. As you heard from everyone here today, instead, we consistently ask ourselves and our management teams to really think about how are we going to optimize return on capital. And as such, we've been able to increase scale, beef up the talent within our teams, all while making the tough choices and decisions about resource allocation that's going to be able to us to ensure operating leverage. So the margin expansion, along with the ability to manage operating expenses, has allowed us to drive profit improvement.
We were pleased to report that we Adjusted EBITDA results in Q3, positive Adjusted EBITDA results in Q3, while also continuing to drive high top-line growth. But as you've heard here a number of times saying, we continue to say throughout PAR, we are only at day one. And our teams, both you heard here and throughout our company, couldn't be any more excited about the opportunity that's in front of us. So I want to thank you for your time today, everyone. And I'm actually going to turn the meeting back over to Chris, who's going to lead us through Q&A section. And then if the rest of the team that was presenting today can also come up, it'd be great.
Thanks, Bryan. Yeah, we're going to have the team come up on stage, and now the fun part, the interactive part of the day. I think we got a pretty inquisitive audience here that we hope we have some remote mics. Tiffany has mics for questions. Also for those participating virtually, again, if you would like to email your questions to ir@partech.com. Tiffani, Andrew over here.
Hey, Andrew Harte from BTIG. Savneet, the ROIC slide that you talked about in the presentation this morning, I think it effectively says kind of the incremental dollars of ARR, about 47% EBITDA margin. Can you just kind of apply that for the entire business? How should we be thinking about it? And maybe just confirm that's the right way for those incremental dollars.
Yeah, look at margin. I would look at it as that was the IRR, the 47%. But I would look at it as if our gross margins are 70% and if our incremental cost to support that is $0.20. And again, I don't think it has never been that high, but let's assume that it is. There's $0.50 of cash flow under each dollar of revenue. And over time, that's a great proxy for what our potential margins could be over time.
And so the point of that is that we're getting, if you can get great leverage on that OpEx base, and assuming we're trading at a fair multiple or a cheap multiple, the upside is quite enormous because if every incremental dollar of revenue is coming in at that incremental margin of 40%-50%, the dropdown is pretty meaningful and comes very fast, too. So it's illustrative. I think that our acquisitions, those were before our acquisitions. I think they'll only help that over time because those are both businesses that were running at higher margin than PAR. So I think the point I was making was that's why I was here. I saw those numbers and said, wow, there's something here.
Thanks. Awesome.
Just to follow up on that. In the public SaaS world, we don't really see companies with 50% incremental margins. It just doesn't seem almost none. Why do you think you guys are able to do that where much larger companies and even companies your size have not?
Yeah, I don't know if we're going to get 50% margins, but I can tell you that over the last two years, the incremental margins have been that or higher. Will that continue? I don't know. I think in the last quarter, I talked, I think this is really powerful. Our sales and marketing spend as a percentage of revenue, not ARR, but revenue, which is even better, was 24%-25%. So I'd argue we're already close to best- in- class when it comes to enterprise software. Our sales and marketing expense was 15%. So we're already close to best- in- class there. And I think that's just going to get better and better and better. Oli talked a little bit about it, but our sales and marketing expenses come down for two years in a row. Our R&D expenses come down, as Steven mentioned.
For us, to me, the margin is just growing into the G&A base. As you know, and some of these people know, we had a bigger G&A base because we had this big hardware and services business, blah, blah, blah. To me, the long-term margin outlook for PAR is quite interesting because if we can hold that 24%-25% at R&D, and Oli wants to take it down even more, and we'll have this fun battle here. Sales and marketing stays at that 10%-15%. There's no company at scale that should be spending 30% or something on G&A. I mean, that number should be small. The roadmap is there to be a very, very profitable business.
I'm not saying we're going to get there, but I say the incremental margin, just look at we pulled out $16 million of EBITDA in the last 12 months. And again, on a revenue ARR basis, so a revenue basis of, I don't know, $100-$120, that's tough to do while growing 25%. So the traction is there. We got to now keep pushing forward.
We got one question through the virtual participants. Inquiry says, you guys seem to have done a really good job with acquisitions over the last six years. What's next on the roadmap? What's the next target to acquire?
So I think we are looking for products that we can put in the flywheel that Joe and Oli talked about. And today, I would say we're not looking for the next point- of- sale system, the next loyalty system. Those are complicated integrations that are messy and hard to do. We're looking for stuff that we can create that better together outcome. So Oli and team are looking deeply in the back office space. Back office is a huge category. It's everything from supply chain inventory, pricing, to surveys, to delivery recovery, and sourcing like that, that we think that we can attach that to Brink and Data Central. We can create really unique customer data and outcomes that we can't have. So we're spending some time there. Joe, in the Engagement Cloud, is spending a lot of time in the c-store and fuel space.
We want to build up a motion there, so we're looking at lots of tools on that side, so I would say we're looking for products that we can create better customer outcomes because in the end, if we can create value for our customers, then we can ascribe some of that value back to PAR at a rapid rate.
Doug, you want to give it to Chuck there?
Thank you. Chuck Nabhan from Stephens. Traditionally, we've always thought of Brink as the land and expand product within the suite. And I understand that that's still the case, but it sounds like there's a tremendous opportunity to cross-sell Punchh into your existing base. So I was hoping you could talk about your go-to-market and any changes you've made to pursue that opportunity.
Yeah. Oli, you want to grab that one?
Yeah, absolutely. So I'd really say the following. The biggest opportunity for us is actually to sell into those Punchh customers. So we have uniquely seen different avenues of cross-sell over the last couple of years. Previously, I agree, it used to be point of sale as the lead-in with more products to follow. Now you have Punchh, which again has a different buyer persona historically. You're selling to the digital marketer, but we're looking for ways via, for instance, the data platform to sell a point- of- sale into back of house payments, et cetera.
I'd say the best way for us to do that is to keep our product teams close, to keep our customer success teams close, to keep our account executives close because it really is possible if you have built out a great trusted relationship with a customer, and then you layer on what that functionality will actually vest in, so PAR Data Platform, the reason I spend some time talking about that is the very easy way to prove out the value of selling into Punchh. By having that unified customer view, you can enhance that customer experience, get more out of those customers. You're able to provide better reporting tools. You can do things like dynamic pricing, and that ultimately will be our way into Punchh, and when we talk about a robust pipeline, right now, a lot of those customers in our pipeline use Punchh.
Another question. Adam?
So I guess on that, when you acquired Stuzo, you basically acquired a gateway to a new customer. Obviously, you merged Punchh and Stuzo for loyalty. But I don't know if you have a c-store point of sale product. But I guess the question is, how do you think about sort of getting into the c-store, expanding beyond Stuzo, building point of sale payments? And how do we think about Brink going into table service and food court? I mean, now that you guys are a larger company and you have the full faith and credit of a larger company and all these other things, I mean, talk to me a little bit about how Brink can sort of expand its tentacles sort of into sort of new product categories and how that's going.
So Joe, why don't you grab the Stuzo one? And Oli, why don't you talk about some of the expansion with TASK and Brink?
Sure. Stuzo and specifically c-store is an amazing industry because the c-store is so many businesses wrapped in one. It's a gas station. It's a grocery store. It's a restaurant. It's a CPG. It's a CPG retail media network. It's a car wash. And so that creates a multi-sided marketplace for us to work into. And so when we think about expanding our product portfolio, we think about the different constituents and stakeholders within that space. So you have CPG companies like Coca-Cola, Juul, Altria, and all of the CPG age-restricted items as well as non-age-restricted items that we can work with to create offers. We think about restaurants and fresh food, so order ahead, delivery, self-checkout. That's a whole another space. The grocery area, you have all the back office, the price books, the self-checkout in the grocery space. Car washes, you have car wash subscriptions.
If you really look at the c-store, there's so many more pieces of technology that we could be working into. We think that the easiest lead into are all of the above store digital side first. POS is definitely a harder implementation, but there's just an endless amount of new technology.
I think the way to think.
Both the innovating and looking.
I think it's just that the way to think about it, we're coming at it differently in the restaurants. While the roadmap's the same, we're starting from the digital ordering side and then coming back into the store versus restaurants. We started in the store and going outward.
Yeah. And we think that even just above store, there's a huge runway for growth for us within that space. And both in R&D with organic innovation, we've proven, if we look at our current customer base, we've proven that we can upsell and cross-sell new products within those current customers. And then we're just now getting started and looking at and thinking about M&A in the convenience space.
I'd say from the point of sale side of things, when it pertains to table service, ultimately, our customers are going to be taking us into table service. So not only customers that we already have, such as Hooters, but also very late-stage, large-cap table service customers that we've been able to, again, partner with over time. And we will hopefully be announcing something shortly with a couple of those opportunities. That's really how we go into table service. And I think that is ultimately the best way to do it because someone is funding your real expansion in that space. From a multi-product perspective now, if you consider the PAR Point of Sale as well as task, task affords us now international entry.
I think ultimately with TASK, multiple larger international brands will be coming to us looking to have PAR POS in the United States as well as Canada and then TASK for their international outlets. And the other thing that I would just add, TASK ultimately is a global platform. That product is extremely robust. It has many different functionality that naturally lends itself more to going to places like hotels, casinos, stadiums than our PAR POS does. PAR POS was constructed to be a restaurant-based product. We intend to be the best at what we do there. TASK will afford us the ability to go into other avenues because they've already done that. So maybe final point, which I thought was really cool. If you go to Australia and you go to the Sydney Football Stadium, 40,000-seat stadium, they use TASK. TASK can do that.
They can do it incredibly well. We want to make sure to build off of that versus trying to take a PAR POS and move it in that direction. So it will be a two-tier approach.
We have a question online. It says, "If you could please expand on your pricing strategy. Illustratively, you showed a $10,000 ARPU per site all in. And that works out to only about $27 per day over an annual basis, equal to less than a couple of hours of minimum wage labor. Doesn't make a lot of sense."
We agree. Oli and I oftentimes lament over this. I think that the way you create price is by creating value. You have to create value to take value. And we have always looked at it as when we took over Brink, we were in a challenge spot. We hadn't raised prices forever because we didn't deserve to with the product not work. Now that the product works, Oli's taken up the average Brink customer that used to be quoted at $1,900 all the way up to $3,000. That's a pretty big move in just three years or something. And so we're moving on the way up on price meaningfully on the Operator Cloud side of the house. Similarly, on back office, Joe's done the same thing on Punchh over the last couple of years.
I don't think we're yet in a market where it's going to triple, at least on the existing products. However, I would say the products we're looking to build or acquire, we are exploring with things where we create value, capture value more immediately, whether that's transaction-based pricing, whether that's some of the AI stuff, voice AI. We'll explore some of that. But I think we just will continue to prove the value and then capture some of that value back to us over time.
Hey, Samad.
Hi, Samad Samana from Jefferies. I have a couple of questions. First, Savneet, I'm going to put you on the spot, and Chris will probably be mad at me for this question later. But the amount of progress you guys have made since we first started covering you is amazing. You've transformed the company. And I think the overview today shows just how innovative you guys have become and what the path forward looks like. But I'm curious, as you think about the growth of this business, what do you think the durable growth looks like from here? And how should we think about maybe some guardrails around the growth and profitability outlook as I look forward from here?
Yeah, we're not giving guidance today, but we've strictly said we want to grow greater than 20%. And we want to do that for as long as we possibly can. And that's kind of the only guardrail we have out there now. And a lot of what I wanted to show to you is that we don't need to reinvent the wheel to generate the growth that we've had so far because a lot of it in front of it, Oli shared some of our late-stage pipeline. We just think there's a lot of visibility for the next couple of years and what we see in front of us. And like anything like PAR, there'll be bumps and bruises along the way. But the long-term revenue roadmap is there. These are customers. These are deals.
If you caught it, Oli talked about Burger King already expanding the product portfolio from what they have already. And when you and others asked me, when's Burger King going to buy the next PAR product, I said, in a year or two. It's already happening. And so that's why I meant these flywheels are just happening at a pace that's hard to predict. On the margin side, I've always said the same thing. We want to get greater than 70% margins. Sales and marketing is 25%, sorry, 15%, R&D to 25%, and G&A 10% and below, hopefully. And that takes you to this 20%-30% margin target.
But as the question's over there, if our incremental margins are 40%-50% on core customers, and that's not me hoping, that's what we've done the last couple of years to show that improvement, that's kind of like your return on equity over time if you add a fair multiple. And so I think, why couldn't we be higher? Now, obviously, we're ambitious. And we're hoping for that. I don't know if it's going to happen. But I think the way in software, the simplest way to determine your end state margin is almost always the ACV of your customer. You can't sell a $10 priceless product at high margins. And so I think in enterprise software, ACV determines that. And you can see our ACVs are growing tremendously. 300,000 or 400,000 used to be a big deal. Now we have customers spending tens of millions with us.
As we sell more product, the ACVs expand. Our long-term margins should expand over time because you get to leverage the OpEx of that same base over time. I think our margin structure today used to say, I want to be greater than 20%, but could it be higher? Maybe if we can continue to grow that over time. Obviously, as you said, it's happened faster than we expected. I didn't expect this to be so quick. I don't know yet. If I had given you guidance five years ago when you were the first guy to start covering us, it wouldn't have looked like this. Our goal is to continue to try to grow as fast as we can. We want to be one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies.
We do want best-in-class marketing. We kind of want both. We think we're a one-to-one asset. I don't know anybody. I don't know if we did a great job of hitting this. I think we did. The fact that we own the core products as opposed to hoping for an integration with somebody else's product, it's the best way to deliver the customer's solution. It's not just that it's a better way for us to make money. We're actually getting a solution for that customer. If somebody wanted to replicate what we had today, I don't know how they would do it. That famous Buffett question, if you had $1 billion, could you recreate it? I don't know. Is there another loyalty provider like Punchh? Definitely not. Is there another thing like Brink?
And then putting it together, integrating it, I don't know if that exists. And so that's all just another way of saying of we can take up price. We can drive better outcomes for customers, and we should be able to drive margins in the long run. But we're still exploring, and we'll see.
Awesome. And then maybe just one follow-up. So as I think about, again, the presentation focusing on R&D, I think, again, really shows how much the company has changed and the innovation engine internally, right? So I'm curious, does that tilt your view of building versus buying? And is there a stage at which you find that the internal build is more efficient or more capital efficient versus buying, or is it always a case-by-case basis? Thank you.
It's pretty simple. If we are going into a greenfield market, we're going to want to build because we have the arrogance to assume that we can build better than the next person because why? We have so much more data. And if there's not an established product that has revenues or customers, it's just not worth it. We can build it better because we've got so many resources to leverage. If we're going into a brownfield market where there are established peers with real revenue, it would have made no sense for us to build loyalty. There were four, five, six companies doing it. It would take a year, year and a half to build the product. Then you put it in your first customer's hands. You're like, "Oh, it's pretty good," but then I want all this other stuff. And then you're six months doing that.
And then you start going to market two and a half years later. And then it takes you forever to get any market share. So if it's a brownfield market, you will see us acquire. I don't think it makes any sense to buy. But with the core DNA of that, once we acquire, we've got to connect it to make it better together. And so that's kind of like a high-level rubric of how I look at it. And we'll probably look at it for a long time to come, unless the incumbent thing is just really shitty or bad. And we then would maybe look to do something different. And I hope everybody saw. I call Steven. Steven is our Chief Investment Officer at PAR. He's got the most heads and most body and the most budget. And so he allocates the capital, as you saw.
I hope what you saw there is that when the three of us took over PAR, we were spending 80%-90% of our R&D dollars on tech debt. There's probably no company in the world that ever had to do that while still growing fast. Now that we've kind of not flipped it, but gotten to that velocity, and that's all because of the teamwork that Steven did, the revenue growth is because we've had this feature development. The R&D has been on new stuff, not fixing the past. Those things interplay really well. If Steven comes back and says, "Next year, 70% of the R&D dollars are on feature development," you better expect that my expectation is there's going to be a lot of revenue from that. It's all circular. But in the end, greenfield will build.
Brownfield will probably buy.
I've got another online question. They said there's a lot of focus in the presentation on the PAR culture and why it's unique. Are you confident that it won't get diluted as you get bigger and as you make further acquisitions? What's the secret sauce?
It's the secret sauce. Well, you guys, I'm so biased, but.
I mean, you can see what we did with retail. One of the reasons we updated our values was to incorporate their values. We saw that. We're like, "That's amazing. We want that." And it's made us stronger. It's made us better. And that's the outcome focus for us. So when we look at acquisitions, we spend a lot of time looking at the values of the team being like, "This might be a great product, but do we like this team? Is this team going to work well with us? Do they fit within our values?" And if they do, I think we've seen with retail, it's been really successful.
We also look at that too, not just in acquisition of companies, but acquisition of new employees, right? So we're getting great talent coming in. So it's taken us a couple of cycles over the years to go from B players that could be B+ , B plus, BA, and now we're really attracting A players. So that's table stakes. But then really, when it comes down to the interview process, it's all about culture, right? It's really hitting that home. And we want people to want to thrive on that because, as Savneet said earlier too, it's not an easy place to work at, right? But it's very exciting. And so we're looking for people that are attractive, that are looking to drive something within disruption instead of just being like a job. And so every team that we have really hits that home.
Yeah, let me ask you a question of kind of scale. So I think in any young company, there's almost like a hubris that the culture is always better when you started because you were 10 people in a room or whatever, and a lot of us have these memories of we were kind of remembering today like sleeping on couches in the office because there was so much work to do, and it's like it was a fun, cute culture or whatever, but it was like survival. But I actually think our culture is better now than it was back then. Was it more fun or do we feel more closely bonded, maybe? But culture is not about that. It's about driving business results, and our culture today drives way better business results, drives way more shareholder value than it ever will before.
And so I'd argue our culture has gotten stronger and better over time. And so to me, a question of culture scaling is two things. Do you have a culture that you reinforce, you build, that's very deliberate, that drives shareholder value? Our culture is about driving shareholder value. It's not about having fun. It's like, can we drive value to customers so that we can then drive shareholder value? And then the second part is, do you have an organizational design that can support that? And that, I think, is also really unique about PAR. We would have never discovered these guys on the stage if we didn't have an organizational design to be like, "Hey, Oli, you're going to go run international." Yes, it's a crappy job, but he got to own a P&L like six months out of business school.
Because we ran a little bit more decentralized, because we created these business units, you can actually test talent faster. And so if you're a young person and you want to be you don't want to go to a traditional company, you're waiting 15 years before you get a chance to have a real P&L or feel like you're a CEO. At PAR, that happens two or three years out. And that's really cool because, one, it gives you, you come out of school and you're like, "Wow, I want to be that person." And then we know really quickly if you're any good or not. And so I think it's the combination of the org structure and design with that culture that's allowed us to discover people.
And again, this is not about youth or not, but Oli was in his super early 30s and he took over our most important product. Joe was like not even 30 and he was running M&A and pulled off the Punchh deal. Burke was, I would argue, the youngest CTO of a large company. The guy that runs our online ordering is like 27. And the idea is we were able to test them because organizational design allowed it and the culture allowed it because we were willing to take a ton of risk on people when others couldn't. And then we cut base fast. So I think it's a combination of the organizational design with the culture that allows it. And at least I believe it can scale to the question because I just think it's actually gotten better, even though it may have felt more homely and fun.
I would say that if any of us told you, "Would you want to bet your kids' college on PAR, this team driving shareholder value or the team six years ago?" None of us, we wouldn't think for a second.
Any other questions, sir?
Adam?
So back to sort of becoming a one-of-one asset. Savneet, you touched on it. No singular company can offer what you offer, right? There's a couple of private players, Crunchtime, whatnot. You have Olo, NCR. But no one really has the whole suite of offering touching the enterprise. I mean, if these people don't there's this line, "Join us or die." If they don't sell to you, what are you, Oli, Savneet, Joe doing to literally poke their eyes out until they cry uncle and either sell to you? Because I look at when I go to Chipotle, for example, they're using NCR. Chipotle is a very forward-looking company. Obviously, we have a former employee of McDonald's in this room. And I know how much McDonald's spends on IT a year. I mean, I look at these companies and I say to myself, "A, what are they waiting for?
And B, what are you doing to accelerate the decline of your weak peers?" Because the sooner you get these customers, the sort of less people want to run against you. So you guys say it's day one. The first thing I think about in the morning is how to kill my competitors.
Yeah, maybe I'll take it first from the operator.
Sorry, I talked about killing competitors.
Yeah, I hate all of those guys. But what I would certainly say, our mantra for M&A has been, "We want to buy best in class," right? So we've really shied away from buying businesses that are dead on the vine. Ultimately, they still have a choice, right? Most of these contracts that we've looked at, change of control provisions run rampant. So we want to make sure that we're buying always best in class. The way that we weaken them, sorry, weaken them, obviously, is by showing market traction with some of these other brands, such as Burger King, right? Ultimately, what keeps us so sticky is this is a major decision. It takes years for a major brand like Chipotle to turn that wheel.
But you better believe that Savneet, myself, Joe are reaching out very proactively, engaging with them early so that when the decision is being made, we are right there, right? So we are weakening these competitors step by step along the way. But we could do an expansive acquisition strategy and then have it turn against us because now you are acquiring an asset that is dying on the vine. The customer still has a choice. And now you are suddenly that business. That's the way that I would kind of conclude.
I guess my question is, use Olo as an example, right? Olo is a large company. They have a reasonable product. Perhaps our loyalty product's better. They don't have a point of sale. But they are, at least so far, the gold standard on online ordering and rails. We're obviously gaining competency really quickly. But that business has, I don't know, call it 70,000 units across, call it 700 brands. So there's 100 on the average unit, the average brand is like, I don't know, like 100 units or something. So there's a lot of individual brands where you can sell stuff into. They're not declining, but they're also just not growing very fast. And that's an opportunity where you own that entire space. You can raise prices. You can sell a lot more products.
I mean, I would look at something like Olo and say, "Hey, you don't want to sell to me. We could create a huge thing together." Are you going after each one of those brands and saying, "Hey, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that"? Because that's what accelerates sort of the sales process. I mean, I'm just thinking about how you sort of attack these companies. I sort of look at it, "Join us or die," right? Maybe you don't want NCR. Maybe you don't want it today. But there are companies out there that are meaningful that don't have the value prop that you do. And so I'm just curious what you guys are doing internally.
To me, I would have a SWAT team inside of my company being like, "All right, how am I going to kill the biggest companies?" Whether it's Crunchtime in inventory or Olo in online ordering and loyalty. It's like, "These are the gorillas that still are growing but are maybe not investing as much as you are, have big logos, but don't have the whole offering." And it's like it's a two-for-one because you either get the business and you kill them, or they cry uncle and they sell to you. And so I'm just curious, do you guys internally have strategies, not buying NCR, but buying the guys that have been basically running a race without a competition?
Yeah, I would say I'll answer it categorically versus specific names. It's twofold. One, stealing their business or what they view as their potential business is a really good tool to get them to cry uncle in your words. Secondly, you try to build partnership and convince them that this is the right place for them to grow their vision over time. If it's founder-led, it's obviously super important that they believe in us as PAR, that we're the place to take care of the baby. And so it's a combination of both. I would say, listen, every deal we have done, it has been wildly creative and unique. And I'd say more than half our deals, I'm looking at you, just we were not the high bid. And so we have had good success in making that happen.
But to your meta point, yes, we need to do that, right? And I think we don't do M&A because it's financially accretive alone. And we buy so much other stuff. As Oli said, it's got to be best in class, and we have to be able to find a way to make that 1 + 1 = 3. I got asked a couple of weeks ago at a conference, like, "Why don't you create Constellation Software?" Something that a lot of you know me for talking about and building. And my point to you is that's a slowing or dying strategy over time because if you can create a unified platform, the risk of AI disrupting you goes way down because you're an integrator. You're the one that creates the AI. If you're just a single module, slick, sticky product selling for two times revenue, that's less interesting.
And so the point being, there is we want those assets because they make sense at PAR. We can drive value to the customer and then drive value to PAR. How we manifest those deals, we'll find out. Crazier things are happening when we bought Punchh. Punchh had more revenue than Brink. We've done some crazy stuff, but we want them. We're going to try to steal their business, and then we're going to try to become best friends with them to pull the deals in.
What I'll just add to what Savneet just said too is we're always looking to add what's the value to the customer and how we're increasing that, right? And so you saw earlier, right? We have this ecosystem that's very vast that's out there. And Savneet does a great job, along with everyone else on his team over here, of constantly having conversations, not with the customers, but also with the partners we have, right? A lot of these companies are partners with us. And so they understand together we're actually going to create more value to the customer. That does make sense for both sides of the table, both for us, right, and also for the customer itself. And so we're constantly trying to turn over as many stones as possible.
And it depends on the situation if the various respective partners are ready for something like that or not. But Adam, you're right. We're constantly having those conversations to how can we accelerate this incremental value to that customer base that we're selling to.
[audio distortion]
I think we agree. And honestly, the PAR Retail, Joe mentioned this, but if you were to talk to the PAR Retail team, they would say that's already happened, which is we're winning more business in that part of the business because of the bigger PAR umbrella. And there's no doubt that's true. Zero doubt.
Okay. We do have another question online. This is one of the knocks on the company is it doesn't have the software gross margins of like 80% plus. What are the reasons for that? And is there a timeline investors could expect to get to that threshold, or is that structurally impossible the way we're currently situated?
We've been transparent. We want to reaffirm our first target is 70 and then going higher. I don't think it's unreasonable for us to have great software margins over time. We've had a headwind, which I think is a tailwind, which is we've had this very fast-growing Payments and MENU business that are below the gross margins of the base. And so over time, those margins will grow and push us forward. And then I think as we scale PAR Retail, we'll have a similar experience, similar success. And as Steven mentioned and Oli mentioned, we're seeing great margin expansion at Brink on the software's perspective very quickly by pulling out hosting costs, but also the R&D costs not growing. So I think we're going to get there. I think it's a matter of time.
As I said, the simple analog is as your ACV grows, your margins should go up. I'm not really worried about the gross margin getting to software. That's not the thing I worry about happening for PAR.
There's a two over here, Chris. Go ahead.
Hi, Pat Mcllwee with William Blair. So you referenced the $30 million late-stage pipeline in the presentation, record pipeline at Data Central. And I think based on what we know, the contribution from Burger King's been pretty minimal to this point. So my question is, we already saw ARR accelerate last quarter. So how much more room for that is there within your current pipeline or backlog? And what do you need? On the contrary, what do you need to go get to maintain this trajectory of growth?
We can't give guidance today , but I would say Burger King's been a great partner. We have grown, as Oli mentioned, we're well over 1,000 sites. We're growing. It creates a really nice tailwind for 2025 and parts to 2026. That's going to happen. As Oli mentioned, part of us not going as fast as maybe some wanted is because we've also found ways to get other products in there. The LTV of this customer has expanded massively. As far as what we need to accelerate growth, honestly, it's just closing on these sales cycles. It's not like we need any R&D or sales marketing expense. It's just closing on the pipeline that we have in front of us.
Thank you.
Another one online. Kind of a two-part question. For POS RFPs awarded the past year for the large enterprise chains where the large legacy providers are the incumbent, what has been the incumbent win rate, like retains, for that specific area? And is the pipeline of enterprise POS deals larger right now this year than it was a year ago?
Yeah, I'll give it to Oli. Win rates in our market are almost useless to look at over time because you get a loss that comes back in a year, generally, once you're on a legacy product. Even if you postpone it a year, we count that as a loss, but you come back to Brink over time. So the actual numbers we've learned are not indicative of what the future is. But Oli, why don't you talk about the question?
Yeah, yeah. I'd say when we have an incumbent stay as part of an RFP, it doesn't mean that you've really lost in actuality because that customer can be back the next year or the following year after that. I would say we've certainly overperformed from a tier one perspective where we sit in pipeline with a lot of these brands. I think PAR absolutely has established itself as the leading tier one provider for the point of sale space, and when we're again looking specifically at the pipeline, it is very robust. It is more robust than it has been before, and we do expect to win our outsized share, especially with those larger brands.
John?
So you mentioned, I think, a $42 billion TAM in the global market. I guess, how are you thinking about the investments that might be needed to start tapping into that and how you might sequence them?
Sure. It's a silly number. It's just meant to show.
No, I know.
The McKinsey, what does it look like? It's never something we'd sign up for or anybody reasonable should. As far as the investment, so as Oli mentioned, we're starting first on the TASK platform of thinking about, okay, we've got all these U.S. brands. Who wants to go international to the markets we're in? And there are really big, powerful brands that are testing out TASK over there already and well-known U.S. brands who we don't actually have, which is kind of neat. Plus, we'll add to the ones that we have and see if we can push some business overseas, and that was sort of the original roadmap. As Oli mentioned, though, there are these call options within there that we did not expect, and so you'll see us trying the stadium thing, the casino thing, just to see if there's another vertical for us to go into.
But primarily, it's reinvesting in the TASK product and more on the go-to-market. We just took our head of enterprise sales at PAR POS, stuck him into TASK to go do the same thing he did at Brink all over again over at TASK. And so the investment there is going to be more focused on go-to-market, a little bit less always on product, but that's where I think TASK should be far more well-known for what it's built than what it is today. And then I think the rest of the global opportunity will be on the engagement and loyalty side, which will be us making the investments to take the Plexure platform and the Punchh platform beyond the few customers we have today. But today, I'd say the focus on TASK.
Oli just took his key deputy, put it into TASK, and so we're going to run the playbook over there by taking U.S. customers and bringing them over.
Is there like a one-year or two-year need to increase investments within TASK, or is your focus to kind of like?
We are increasing investments there. You're not talking like tens of millions. You're talking single digit, like low single digit. So we're not really putting the product is built. Right now, it's about commercializing it more. That's a better way to think about it.
If I can add something there.
Please.
On the Engagement Cloud side, we actually have a huge white space that we don't talk about, which is our existing brands, 30 of the top 50 brands, eight of the top 30 convenience and fuel retailers. There's tens of thousands of locations, if not hundreds of thousands of white space just with those brands for us to go international. Many of our products today are already international ready. We have, for the purpose of really focusing in on growing, trimmed back our focus on the number of integrations we have to build, but that is white space that's out there for us to go. The best way to go global is to go with a customer that partners with you and takes you globally. We have those partners today in the U.S. within our PAR Punchh, PAR Retail, our PAR Plexure platforms that we're looking to.
We certainly see that as huge white space for us.
Thanks.
Other questions?
Got another one online here. It says, "What is the strategy and roadmap for integrating TASK more broadly and getting international sight lines?
I think we've kind of answered that already. The goal is to expand the TASK platform, commercialize this product that we think is special. As I mentioned, Ali, who runs the TASK underneath our business unit, has put in his key deputy to run TASK and drive it forward. And then I think what we're excited about is that the TASK team is amazing. I don't think he's here, but Trevor, who runs sales engineers and sales, I mean, the talent is there. TASK is a tiny product, tiny business, but the quality of talent is like leaps and bounds. And so we're going to get to leverage. There he is. And we're going to leverage that as we go forward. And listen, some of you have talked to me in one-on-one.
There's a couple of call options that we said that we didn't pay for within TASK that are really exciting to us as an organization, thinking about their largest customers and how we monetize over time, but long story short, we're working hard to integrate the cultures first. Organizationally, it's going to roll into our POS business under Oli, and then it's the playbook we just talked about.
That's great. We certainly appreciate your time, energy, questions today. Please, we'll have more time for demos in the lobby area. The team will be around for some kind of sidebar conversations, but thank you so much for today. For those participating online, this concludes our presentation. Thank you very much.