The LSE Directory / Alternative data
Foursquare is a US location-technology and geospatial-intelligence company. It maintains a global points-of-interest database of more than 120 million places across over 200 countries, built in part from more than 16 billion human-verified consumer check-ins collected since it opened its Places API to developers in 2009. It licenses this data, along with movement patterns derived from more than 500 million unique devices, through developer APIs and SDKs, bulk data feeds, marketing-measurement products (Attribution, Audience, Proximity), and a geospatial analytics and visualization suite (Spatial Studio, Workbench and Desktop) built on its H3-based Hex Tiles. What distinguishes Foursquare from other places-data vendors is that it sources location signal directly from its own consumer apps, Swarm and, since a 2025 acquisition, Superlocal, rather than relying solely on third-party SDK partnerships. It layers this first-party data on top of datasets it acquired from Placed and Factual and a network of more than 550 integrated data and technology partners, including AWS, Google, Adobe and Snowflake. Its customers range from app developers embedding place search and check-in features, to marketers and advertisers running location-based attribution and audience-targeting campaigns, to financial-services firms, including hedge funds, that use its aggregated foot-traffic trends as an alternative-data input for equity research and trading. Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai founded the company, launching the Foursquare City Guide app at SXSW in March 2009; Crowley had previously built the location-sharing app Dodgeball, which he sold to Google in 2005. Foursquare raised roughly $265 million across Series A through F funding rounds between 2009 and 2018 from investors including Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Spark Capital, then grew its data business through acquisition: it bought the foot-traffic analytics firm Placed from Snap Inc in 2019, merged with the location-data firm Factual in an all-stock deal in 2020, and acquired the geospatial-analytics startup Unfolded in 2021, which became the Foursquare Studio product. Gary Little, previously a Foursquare board member who had helped negotiate the Placed and Factual deals, became CEO in 2021; the company reports more than 300 employees worldwide. In 2023 Foursquare launched its Knowledge Graph product and passed 16 billion cumulative check-ins. In 2024 it added a Sales Impact measurement product and released an open-source points-of-interest dataset. In 2025 it acquired the map and location-logging app Superlocal and introduced a unified Geospatial Intelligence Platform combining its data, compute and visualization tools in one environment.
