Foursquare

Foursquare cut 105 jobs, about 25% of its workforce, in 2024 as it narrowed its consumer-app focus to Swarm.

Who they are

Foursquare appears in coverage as a location-technology company spanning a consumer check-in product, Swarm, and location-data services used by other apps and platforms. Co-founder Dennis Crowley is central to its earlier identity, while the company’s stories also trace executive succession from David Shim to board member Gary Little.

The recent arc

The latest company-specific coverage is defined by contraction and consolidation. In May 2024, Foursquare laid off 105 employees, reported as roughly a quarter of its workforce, to streamline operations; in October it said it would sunset City Guide on December 15 and concentrate on Swarm, reversing the 2014 two-app split. Recent references to Crowley instead concern his separate Hopscotch Labs venture, suggesting that the newest attention around the founder is no longer necessarily attention around Foursquare itself.

The tension

Coverage repeatedly pits Foursquare’s consumer heritage against the greater strategic weight and scrutiny of location data. Its Pilgrim SDK was built to license location capabilities to app developers, and partnerships put Foursquare data into Twitter’s location-tagged feeds, Reddit location tags, and Snapchat context cards alongside OpenTable and Lyft. But the North Dakota Care19 reporting, which said location data was sent to Foursquare despite stated privacy promises, shows why data distribution can create reputational risk even when the company is not the app’s operator.

Why it matters

If the Swarm-focused reset holds, Foursquare’s significance will rest on whether a narrower consumer product can coexist with, and support, a location-data business embedded in third-party experiences. The earlier Factual all-stock merger, with the companies reporting more than $150 million in combined 2019 revenue, points to the scale sought through data consolidation; the unanswered question is whether streamlining and product retrenchment strengthen that position or reduce its consumer-facing differentiation.

Related: Dennis Crowley · Twitter · Snapchat · Pilgrim · Report: the official COVID-19 contact tracing app for North Dakota is