This paper proposes a set of piecewise Toeplitz matrices as the linear mapping/sensing operator $\mathcal{A}: \mathbf{R}^{n_1 \times n_2} \rightarrow \mathbf{R}^M$ for recovering low rank matrices from few measurements. We prove that such operators efficiently encode the information so there exists a unique reconstruction matrix under mild assumptions. This work provides a significant extension of the compressed sensing and rank minimization theory, and it achieves a tradeoff between reducing the memory required for storing the sampling operator from $\mathcal{O}(n_1n_2M)$ to $\mathcal{O}(\max(n_1,n_2)M)$ but at the expense of increasing the number of measurements by $r$. Simulation results show that the proposed operator can recover low rank matrices efficiently with a reconstruction performance close to the cases of using random unstructured operators.