- Foursquare has raised $150 million in funding led by The Raine Group and acquired Placed from Snap Inc.
- Former Placed CEO David Shim is going to become president of Foursquare
Foursquare has announced it has raised $150 million in funding led by The Raine Group and that it acquired Placed from Snap Inc. The acquisition terms of the deal were undisclosed. Going forward, Placed founder and CEO David Shim is going to become president of Foursquare. And the Placed Attribution product will be known as Placed powered by Foursquare. Including this round of funding, Foursquare has raised nearly $400 million.
“This is one of the largest investments ever in the location tech space. The investment will fund our acquisition and also capitalize us for our increased R&D and expansion plans, allowing us to focus on our mission to build the world’s most trusted, independent location technology platform,” said Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck in a statement about the funding.
Why did Foursquare acquire Placed? Foursquare is going to add Placed — which is the #1 in-store visit attribution across digital, OOH, and TV to its bundle of location-based offerings. There are about 500 brands that rely on Placed Attribution today. And together, more than 1,000 brands including over 50% of the Fortune 100 have selected Placed or Foursquare as a location services partner across its entire suite of products. Currently, Foursquare’s revenue is more than $100 million and over than 90% of it comes from the company’s enterprise business.
Placed launched about eight years ago and raised about $13.4 million (Crunchbase) before Snap Inc. acquired the company in 2017.
Glueck also highlighted five key areas that Foursquare is focused on to set up a complete toolkit of location-aware services
1.) Developer Tools – Building smarter apps and customer engagement using geo-context
2.) Analytics – This includes consumer insights for planning
3.) Audiences – This way businesses can reach consumer segments for their message
4.) Attribution – To test and learn which messages, segments, and channels work best
5.) Consumer – Where through its own apps and Foursquare Labs’ R&D efforts will showcase what is possible and inspire developers via innovations around the contextual location
Placed is going to be able to grow even stronger with access to Foursquare’s core Pilgrim technology and mass of first-party data.
“For instance, Placed will leverage Foursquare’s global map of 105 million POI’s across over 190 countries and can immediately tap into Foursquare’s measured audience in the U.S. of over 100 million monthly devices,” Glueck added. “Both Placed and Foursquare have long been unique in the location space as the only players working with actual consumer on-the-ground confirmations as the foundation of our technologies. It’s an enormously difficult problem to accurately detect the difference between walking by or stopping in a particular store, or distinguishing between visits to two adjoining stores or in multi-story buildings. A big advantage for both Foursquare and Placed has been focusing on a first-party ‘always on’ panel with multi-sensor and true stop awareness, while others rely on third-party sporadic data.”
