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Foursquare has just made its first acquisition. The location technology company acquired Placed from Snap Inc. in the wake of a new $ 150 million investment led by the Raine Group. The terms of the agreement have not been disclosed. Founder and CEO David Shim will become President of Foursquare.
placed is the biggest competitor of Foursquare Attribution product, which allows brands to track the physical impact (visitor traffic to store) of a campaign or digital ad. Until now, the combined Foursquare placement and allocation totaled more than $ 3 billion in store visits.
Placed launched in 2011 and raised $ 13.4 million (according to Crunchbase) before being acquired by Snap Inc. in 2017.
As part of the deal with Foursquare, the company's award product will now be named Placed powered by Foursquare. The acquisition also means that Placed powered by Foursquare will have more than 450 measurable media partners, including Twitter, Snap, Pandora and Waze. In addition, more than 50% of Fortune 100 companies are badociated with Placed or Foursquare.
It should also be noted that this latest investment of $ 150 million is the largest round of financing ever for Foursquare. It follows a $ 33 million F series last year.
Jeff Glueck, CEO of Foursquare had to say about funding in a prepared statement:
This is one of the largest investments ever made in the localization technology sector. This investment will finance our acquisition and will also allow us to capitalize on our growing R & D and expansion projects, allowing us to focus on our mission to create the most reliable and independent location technology platform in the world.
This last element, relating to an independent location technology platform, is important here. Foursquare is ten years old and, from a consumer-oriented place registration application, has transformed – into a game, into a development and location badysis platform.
Indeed, when Glueck exposes his vision of society, he lists five key areas of intervention:
- Development tools to create smarter applications and customer engagement, using the geographic context;
- Analysis, including consumer knowledge for planning;
- The public, so that businesses can reach the right segment of consumers for their message;
- Assignment, to test and learn which messages, segments and channels work best;
- Consumer, where, through our own applications and the R & D efforts of Foursquare Labs, we show what is possible and inspire developers through our innovations in contextual localization.
You'll notice that its consumer applications, Foursquare and Swarm, are at the bottom of the list. But that's because the true technological and strategic advantage of Foursquare is not to create the best social platform. In fact, Glueck stated that over 90% of the company's revenues came from the corporate sector. The advantage of Foursquare lies in the precision of its technology, as evidenced by the decade of data from Foursquare, Swarm and users who have specifically verified their location.
The Pilgrim SDK is part of the first item on the list: development tools. The Pilgrim SDK enables developers to incorporate smart location experiences and notifications into their applications and services. But it also extends Foursquare access to data other than its own applications to create a larger ecosystem, providing it with the data it needs to provide badysis tools to brands and publishers.
With this acquisition, Placed will be able to leverage the existing map of 105 million Foursquare landmarks in 190 countries, as well as the measured audience of more than 100 million monthly readers in the United States.
Foursquare and Placed share a similar philosophy of building against a set of true consumer responses. Asking real people to confirm the name of their location is the only way to know if your technology is accurate or not. Placed has benefited from more than 135 million survey responses in its consumer-driven survey applications, all of which have opted for its award application. Foursquare exponentially expands the truth about machine learning by adding more than 13 billion confirmations to consumers.
The hope is that Foursquare is accurate enough to become the badysis company and de facto location services for the measurement of advertising expenses. With enough scale, this could allow the company to enter the walled gardens where most of the ad spend, Facebook and Google, is going.
Of course, to become the "most reliable and reliable independent localization technology platform in the world", consumers must trust it. After all, location can be the most sensitive information about them. Foursquare has taken steps to clarify its technology. In fact, at SXSW this year, Foursquare proposed a limited series of a product called Hypertrending, which essentially consisted of an anonymous view of real-time location data showing activity in the Austin area.
This is what board chairman and co-founder Dennis Crowley I had to say at the time:
We believe that the current general trend with Internet companies and technology companies is to continue to give users an increasingly personalized (albeit opaque) view of the world, while the companies that create these streams retain the global vision of God. Hypertrending is an example of how we can use Foursquare's global vision of the world and make it available to users who do what it is. That's what we mean by "transparency" – we want to be honest in public about what our technology can do, how it works, and what specific design decisions we made when it was created.
On the acquisition of Placed today, Jeff Glueck said:
Both companies also share a commitment to consumer confidentiality and control. Our Foursquare credo of "data as a privilege" is growing as our society grows. We believe that the site should only be shared when consumers can see real value and visible benefits related to the location. We remain committed to elevating the sector through respect for transparency, user control and the implementation of multiple levels of privacy protection.
This new funding brings the total funding of Foursquare to $ 390.4 million.
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