The story
Founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai in 2009.1
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.
Read the full text
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.
In May 2024, Foursquare laid off 105 employees, approximately 25% of its workforce.
In September 2026, Foursquare was acquired by Infillion, an advertising agency which said it will "evaluate the future of Foursquare's consumer applications." When asked by an avid user of Foursquare's flagship and only well-known app, Swarm, the ad agency's CEO stated, "We don't have anything to announce today on it."
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.
In January 2016, the company raised $45 million in a series E funding round led by Union Square Ventures. Morgan Stanley participated along with previous investors: DFJ Growth, Andreessen Horowitz and Spark Capital. In October 2018, the company announced that it raised an additional $33 million in a series F funding round co-led by investors Simon Ventures and Naver, in addition to longstanding investor Union Square Ventures.
Apparatus, Systems, and Methods for Providing Location Information
This patent focuses on an efficient location query mechanism. By representing regions of interest with polygons and dividing them into sub-polygons, the mechanism builds an index system for quick determination of whether a given location falls within any sub-polygon, enabling rapid location-based queries. U.S. patent 9,753,965
From Wikipedia’s article on Foursquare (company), shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.6