We caught up with CEO Noah Glass at the ICR conference. | Photo courtesy of Olo
Olo founder and CEO Noah Glass doesn’t travel so much anymore. It’s one of the perks of no longer being the head of a public company. The online ordering giant went private last year in a $2 billion sale to private-equity firm Thoma Bravo.
Back when Olo was still $OLO, Glass was on the road a lot, meeting with investors. He didn’t hate it, but it took up a lot of his time.
“It takes time away from being with the team, being with customers to hear about their problems, and being with the team to solve the problems,” Glass said. “And it’s nice to have some of that time back.”
Glass made an exception to attend the ICR conference in Orlando this week. The annual investor conference is one of the few events he’ll still go to, he said, mainly to meet with Olo customers.
We sat down with him to talk about the company’s eventful year, including its recent acquisition of loyalty platform Spendgo. We talked about the possibility of more acquisitions, and got an update on Olo’s long-term goal to digitize every restaurant transaction.
Here are the highlights.
Life under Thoma Bravo
Not much has changed about Olo’s trajectory under its new owner, Glass said. The company’s goal of providing “hospitality at scale” through a combination of online ordering, marketing and payment products remains the same. It is still looking to grow aggressively, but, perhaps not surprisingly, it is also focusing more on the bottom line. That led to some layoffs in September after the acquisition closed.
“[Profitability] is kind of the key metric in the minds of private equity,” Glass said. “But then we’ve used the profit to reinvest in the growth engines.”
That includes developing new products as well as acquisitions, like Spendgo.
It’s all part of the standard playbook for Thoma Bravo, a frequent investor in the tech space.
“Thoma Bravo likes to say buy and build,” Glass said. “They like to talk about being industry agnostic, but betting on the jewel of various industries, and then build on it.”
The Spendgo acquisition
The company wasted no time putting that game plan into action, acquiring Spendgo in a “buzzer beater” in late December. The deal fills a gap for Olo, which did not previously have its own loyalty product. And it should satisfy demand from restaurants that had been asking for one.
“I think it’s 65% of our customers that already have a loyalty program but have said it would be way better from a simplicity perspective to have one relationship,” Glass said.
The company viewed Spendgo as a good fit tech-wise. Its programs are tied to customers’ phone numbers, rather than emails and passwords, which makes signups easier and gives restaurants more flexibility in how they design their program. Olo took a similar approach with Olo Accounts, which allows customers to log in and order from more than 400 restaurant brands using their phone number.
“It takes that friction out of the equation, creating a password, remembering a password,” Glass said. “They were pioneers in doing that.”
M&A plans
Spendgo is Olo’s third acquisition, and it probably won’t be its last.
What might it buy next? The company will look to fill in gaps in its offering, and it will target vendors that are part of its integration network of more than 400 suppliers. “I think that’s a really good farm league for Olo acquisitions,” Glass said.
Despite ramping up its M&A activity, Olo still intends to maintain open relationships with other vendors, giving restaurants choice in how they build their tech stacks.
“That’s a very important part of Olo’s philosophy, our history and our legacy in the industry, is to be an open platform, to work with any provider that restaurant brands want to work with, even as we offer more and more things directly,” Glass said.
Our two cents: A POS system has always been the most obvious gap in Olo’s offering. With Thoma Bravo’s backing, it should have the firepower to add one. It could also pick up one of the many voice AI suppliers to handle phone and/or drive-thru orders.
The state of ‘hospitality at scale’
Olo’s goal is to allow restaurants to digitize every transaction and use the data to create more personalized experiences for customers.
It’s a tantalizing idea and one that many restaurants and tech providers are pursuing. So how close is Olo to delivering it?
Somewhere around 100 of the company’s 800 customers are now using Olo’s full “flywheel”—ordering, payments and marketing—including one large, publicly traded chain that presented at ICR. (Glass would not say which.)
Glass said the technology is “yielding better transaction volume from those guests, frequency from those guests, lifetime value from those guests, than spray and pray marketing ever could.”
The biggest barrier to getting more restaurants on board is the payments part, which is needed to digitize the on-premise orders that still make up the vast majority of restaurant transactions.
But it can be a hard sell. Olo is new to the payments game, and many brands are locked into long contracts with legacy processors. They also tend to view payments as a cost center rather than something that can actually help them grow their business.
“So many people look at the bottom line, and I think now we have brands that we can truly show, yes, their fee might be half a penny higher with Olo, but here’s all the things they’re getting, and here’s how it drives frequency,” said Alayna Sullivan, Olo’s senior director of corporate communications and brand marketing.
The state of the industry
Going into 2026, Glass remains concerned about restaurants’ heavy reliance on discounting and third-party delivery promotions, two tactics that have helped generate sales at a time of weak consumer spending.
Glass said these are short-term solutions, and that the path to building a sustainable and profitable business is by building direct relationships with customers, not just offering them the lowest price. That, of course, is Olo’s business model, but it rings true—it’s just easier said than done.
“I think it’s a much healthier long-term approach,” he said. “It’s seductive and it’s a quick sugar hit to go and do deals with marketplaces and dump funds in to make your numbers, but it comes at a long-term cost.”
