Foursquare simply made its first acquisition. The location tech firm has acquired Placed from Snap Inc on the heels of a contemporary $150 million funding led by the Raine Group. The phrases of the deal weren’t disclosed. Placed founder and CEO David Shim will develop into President of Foursquare.
Placed is the most important competitor to Foursquare’s Attribution product, which permits manufacturers to trace the bodily influence (foot site visitors to retailer) of a digital marketing campaign or advert. Up till now, Placed and Attribution by Foursquare mixed have measured over $three billion in ad-to-store visits.
Placed launched in 2011 and raised $13.four million (in keeping with Crunchbase) earlier than being acquired by Snap Inc. in 2017.
As a part of the cope with Foursquare, the corporate’s Attribution product will henceforth be referred to as Placed powered by Foursquare. The acquisition additionally implies that Placed powered by Foursquare may have greater than 450 measureable media companions, together with Twitter, Snap, Pandora, and Waze. Moreover, greater than 50 p.c of the Fortune 100 are partnered with Placed or Foursquare.
It’s additionally value noting that this newest funding of $150 million is the most important financing spherical for Foursquare ever, and comes following a $33 million Series F final yr.
Here’s what Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck needed to say in regards to the financing in a ready assertion:
This is among the largest investments ever within the location tech house. The funding will fund our acquisition and likewise capitalize us for our elevated R&D and enlargement plans, permitting us to deal with our mission to construct the world’s most trusted, unbiased location expertise platform.
That final bit, about an unbiased location expertise platform, is vital right here. Foursquare is ten years previous and has remodeled from a consumer-facing location check-in app — a recreation, actually — right into a location analytics and growth platform.
Indeed, when Glueck paints his imaginative and prescient for the corporate, he lists 5 key areas of focus:
- Developer Tools to construct smarter apps and buyer engagement, utilizing geo-context;
- Analytics, together with client insights for planning;
- Audiences, so companies can attain the best client segments for his or her message;
- Attribution, to check and be taught which messages, segments and channels work finest;
- Consumer, the place by our personal apps and Foursquare Labs’ R&D efforts we showcase what’s attainable and encourage builders through our improvements round contextual location.
You’ll discover that its client apps, Foursquare and Swarm, are on the backside of the record. But that’s as a result of Foursquare’s actual technological and strategic benefit isn’t in constructing the very best social platform. In reality, Glueck mentioned that greater than 90 p.c of the corporate’s income got here from the enterprise aspect of the enterprise. Foursquare’s benefit is within the accuracy of its expertise, as afforded by the last decade of knowledge that has come from Foursquare, Swarm, and the customers who’ve expressly verified their location.
The Pilgrim SDK matches into that high merchandise on the record: developer instruments. The Pilgrim SDK permits builders to embed location-smart experiences and notifications into their apps and providers. But it additionally expands Foursquare’s entry to information from past its personal apps to the larger ecosystem, yielding the info it must energy analytics instruments for manufacturers and publishers.
With this acquisition, Placed will have the ability to leverage Foursquare’s current map of 105 million locations of curiosity throughout 190 international locations, in addition to faucet into the measured U.S. viewers of over 100 million month-to-month units.
Foursquare and Placed share an identical philosophy of constructing towards a reality set of actual client responses. Getting actual folks to substantiate the title of their location is the one approach to know in case your expertise is correct or not. Placed has leveraged over 135 million survey responses in its first-party Placed survey apps, all from shoppers opted-in to its rewards app. Foursquare expands the reality set for…
