Foursquare Labs Inc., commonly known as Foursquare, is a geolocation technology company and data cloud platform based in the United States. Founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai in 2009, the company rose to prominence with the launch of its local search-and-discovery mobile app. The app, Foursquare City Guide, popularized the concept of real-time location sharing and checking-in.
Alongside additions and iterations to its consumer apps, the company also began to create products that leverage the location data collected via billions of check-ins.
History
Launch and early years
Co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai founded Foursquare in 2008 and launched Foursquare City Guide in 2009 at SXSW. Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University and subsequently sold it to Google in 2005.
In November 2009, Foursquare opened up access to its API, enabling developers to access data generated by the Foursquare app and build applications on top of that data. Foursquare opened its second office, in San Francisco, the next year, shortly after reaching one million users. In 2011, Foursquare began working on Pilgrim SDK, the core technology that combines stop-detection and snap-to-place functions in order to provide contextual awareness to Foursquare's apps. As of January 31, 2023, Foursquare renamed its Pilgrim SDK product to Movement SDK.
Swarm release
In May 2014, the company launched Swarm, a companion app to Foursquare City Guide, that moved the social networking and location sharing aspects of the service to a separate application. In August 2014, the company launched Foursquare 8.0, a completely new version of the service that shifted the focus from check-ins to focus on local search and recommendations.
2015 to present
In April 2015, Foursquare began offering location-based enterprise products for marketers and advertisers with the launch of Pinpoint. The company subsequently released Attribution, a tool for media performance measurement, in February 2016, and the Movement (FKA Pilgrim) software development kit, which allows developers to use Foursquare's core Movement technology to add context into their own apps and services, in March 2017. Each of these tools can be used independently, or they can be bundled together.
On January 14, 2016, co-founder Dennis Crowley stepped down from his position as CEO. He moved to an Executive Chairman position while Jeff Glueck, the company's COO, succeeded Crowley as the new CEO.
In 2017, Foursquare announced its expansion in the Asia-Pacific region with partners like Tencent and Samsung, and a new office in Singapore. Over the course of the three-year period from 2015 through 2017, the company's revenue grew by more than 50% each year. In early 2018, Foursquare opened a new engineering office in Chicago.
In May 2019, Foursquare bought Placed from Snap Inc.
On December 6, 2019, Foursquare's Board of Directors announced the appointment of David Shim as Chief Executive Officer and Member of the Board.
In April 2020, Foursquare announced a merger with Factual Inc. in an all-stock deal.
On November 5, 2020 it was announced that David Shim was stepping down as Chief Executive Officer, to be replaced by Gary Little, a member of the company's board.
On May 20, 2021, Foursquare announced an agreement to acquire Unfolded, a next-generation platform for geospatial data unification, enrichment, visualization, and analytics to help solidify the company's location, geospatial technology, and developer community. Unfolded has been renamed to Foursquare Studio.
In February 2022, Foursquare launched Hex Tiles, a tiling system that maximizes the speed and efficiency of data analytics for businesses looking to perform large-scale geospatial analytics for decision-making purposes.
In May 2023, the company launched Foursquare Graph, a geospatial knowledge graph designed to improve how businesses derive value from location data through the use of graph technology and the H3 grid system.
Funding
Foursquare is principally funded by Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, DFJ Growth, Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners, Spark Capital, and more. The company raised $1.35 million in its Series A round and $20 million in its Series B round. On June 24, 2011, Foursquare raised $50 million on a $600 million valuation. Their Series D round funding of $35 million was announced on December 19, 2013 and led by DFJ Growth.