Foursquare buys location analytics service Placed from Snap, raises $150M led by Raine Group; Placed reportedly raised $13.4M before Snap acquired it in 2017
yes, that Foursquare — just raised $150M and bought a Seattle startup owned by Snap socalTECH.com : Snap Unloads Placed To Foursquare Tweets: Paris Martineau / @parismartineau : even if you aren't a foursquare user, chances are the company has access to your location data in one way or another. it's a location tracking powerhouse, working with over 150,000 partners—from Uber to AccuWeather to Twitter—and it's just getting started https://www.wired.com/... pic.twitter.com/uIWatDXLmw Brian Morrissey / @bmorrissey : Foursquare building a massive business and exiting at $1b+ would be a great perseverance story to counter the regular startup hockey-stick narrative https://twitter.com/... Dennis Crowley / @dens : BTW, for more context, peep this great blog post from @JeffGlueck about the acquisition & our larger @Foursquare strategy in general. This puts Foursquare north of $100M+ revenue/yr for the first time (!!) which is a huge milestone for any company in tech: https://enterprise.foursquare.com/ ... Dan Seifert / @dcseifert : well, I mean, I used foursquare religiously for years until the past year or so because I got tired of their biz model of profiting off of my location data. Chris Phenner / @cphenner : We're excited. 1,000+ customers, 350+ employees, 100mm+ devices that visit 100mm+ places globally, fueled by 150,000+ API keys issued. https://enterprise.foursquare.com/ ... Jonty Wareing / @jonty : In “everything is backwards” news, Foursquare just acquired part of Snapchat. https://enterprise.foursquare.com/ ... @foursquare : Our vision is to create a future where consumers and companies engage more deeply with the real world through location tech. That's why we're excited to announce that @Placed will be joining @Foursquare - https://www2.foursquare.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Dan Frommer / @fromedome : Impressive how Foursquare has maintained mostly fuzzy perception as it literally tracks your location and tells companies whether their ad got you to physically move your person! via @qz http://npx.io/... Dennis Crowley / @dens : Big news out of @Foursquare HQ this morning as we make our first-ever acquisition! Great work by @JeffGlueck & @davidshim driving the deal, and huge thanks to both our teams for all the hard work required to pull this off! https://twitter.com/... Anand Sanwal / @asanwal : This has been a pretty remarkable story of a tech company transforming itselfhttps://t.co/K5dKqWqxFP Ken Yeung / @thekenyeung : Foursquare raises $150 million and strengthens its ability to help business track digital-to-physical foot traffic with the acquisition of Snap's Placed service.It's Foursquare's first buy and adds more credibility to its enterprise location push. https://techcrunch.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This deal closes a loop that opened in 2017, when Snap acquired Placed as one of its few diversification bets away from the camera app — an SEC filing later showed Snap paid $135M in cash for it. Two years on, Snap is unloading the asset while Foursquare doubles down on the business it pivoted into after abandoning its consumer social network, a transition it funded with a $33M Series F in 2018.
The $150M round led by Raine Group gives Foursquare both the currency and the balance sheet to consolidate location intelligence rather than just compete in it. As Wired's coverage noted, the company already reaches location data through more than 150,000 partners including Uber, AccuWeather, and Twitter — Placed adds offline purchase attribution on top of that footprint.
First-order effects
- Snap exits a non-core analytics business at a loss relative to its $135M purchase price, sharpening its focus back onto the core camera and ads product.
- Foursquare gains Placed's store-visit measurement clients and a Seattle team, extending its pitch from raw location data supply to closed-loop ad attribution.
Second-order effects
- Rival location-data and foot-traffic measurement vendors now face a better-capitalized Foursquare that can bundle data licensing with attribution, pressuring standalone analytics pricing.
- Ad buyers evaluating Uber-, AccuWeather-, and Twitter-scale partnerships get fewer, larger counterparties, shifting negotiating leverage toward the consolidated data provider.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, location intelligence consolidates around a handful of scaled players absorbing point solutions — the same trajectory Foursquare's own pivot from consumer app to infrastructure suggests, with further M&A among mid-size data firms a live possibility.
The trend: Consumer location apps are converting into B2B data-and-measurement infrastructure through acquisitions and large private rounds, consolidating a fragmented location-analytics market.