Foursquare announced today that its co-founder, Dennis Crowley, is stepping into a new role as Executive Chairman.
Crowley has tapped Jeff Glueck, who has served as COO for the past year, as Foursquare’s new CEO.
“I will use my past experience scaling businesses to accelerate Foursquare across both the consumer and enterprise sides of the business,” said Glueck.
In addition, four-year Foursquare veteran and to date CRO, Steven Rosenblatt, is serving as President.
Foursquare unveiled as well two promotions: Kinjil Mathur, to CMO and Jonathan Crowley to VP Product.
The executive team expands including current VP Finance, Rory Parness, Meghan Lapides (VP HR), and Brian Chase (General Counsel).
As part of its expansion plans Foursquare is hiring 30 new positions across sales, engineering and other functions.
The company announced as well that it had closed a new round of growth funding amounting to $45M led by Union Square Ventures, with major participation from new outside investors including Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners, as well as previous investors including DFJ Growth, Andreessen Horowitz and Spark Capital.
This funds will frovide Foursquare the fuel needed to continue enhancing apps and building out the location intelligence, which is the foundation of every app, product or service the company develops.
“Today, our company is confident and unified around this mission to use our understanding of location intelligence to enrich consumer experiences and inform business solutions,” underlines the new CEO, Jeff Gluek.
Growth accelerated in the latest 18 months increasing partners and users
“When Foursquare began in 2009, it started as a fun check-in game that exploded in popularity. From that auspicious start, Foursquare has evolved, always keeping high-quality location data at the core, but now offering a multitude of products that serve consumers, developers, marketers, analysts and more” explains Glueck.
And he continues, “In the past 18 months, we have made enormous traction on this mission. We signed Apple, Twitter, Pinterest and others as customers, and have 100,000 more developers who rely on our location data. We just had our biggest revenue month, quarter and year. Foursquare and Swarm, our consumer apps/sites, have over 50 million monthly active users and daily check-ins are at an all-time high. We launched two new B2B areas which
now drive the majority of our revenue: our programmatic ad platform Pinpoint and ourEnterprise Solutions (Place Insights and Places tools for developers), which grew revenues 170% and 160% respectively in 2015.”
Some milestone achievements
“Along the way, we’ve built a lot of amazing products and technology: apps used by millions of people around the world, an API used by more than 100,000 developers, geofences for more than 65 million places across the globe, Pilgrim technology that understands how phones move in and out of those spaces, and B2B solutions like our geo-based programmatic platform, Pinpoint, and Place Insights, our foot-traffic analytics tool. The company has grown into something so much bigger and broader than we ever imagined in 2009, ” Dennis Crowley summarizes.
” Our tools can do some pretty amazing things. We recognize when phones stop in over 65 million business locations, which triggers magical recommendations from our Foursquare app, like what to order at a restaurant you’ve never been to. In aggregate, our data makes up the world’s largest foot traffic panel, which Place Insights analyzes to reveal trends in culture and business globally. We used it to accurately predict iPhone 6s sales, look at Black Friday shopping data, and our customers are finding new ways to apply our insights all the time.
With Pinpoint, we can identify groups of young people who, for example, frequent sports bars 3+ times a month, and help an alcohol company or an auto brand to reach them using digital media, connecting the online and offline worlds for our partners, which includes about a third of Fortune 500 brands,” adds Crowley.
Image over the headline (left to right).- Steven Rosenblatt (President Foursquare), Dennis Crowley (Executive Chairman & Co-founder Foursquare) and Jeff Glueck (CEO Foursquare). © Foursquare.
