Foursquare Acquires Placed, Announces $150M in Funding
Foursquare and Placed are location tech’s new power couple.
The location intelligence firm is acquiring Placed, which had previously been bought by Snap for its top-rate online-to-offline attribution solution, and together the two will offer one of the most powerful attribution solutions in the location industry. The solution will be called Placed powered by Foursquare.
Foursquare and Placed offer location-based insights and measurement to over 1,000 advertisers, including more than half of the Fortune 100. They have measured a combined $3 billion in ad-to-store visits over the past 12 months. The companies’ measurable media partners include top platforms such as Twitter, Snap, and Waze.
This is Foursquare’s first acquisition. It comes as the company announces its largest ever financing round, $150 million led by The Raine Group.
With the acquisition, Placed will become more powerful, accessing Foursquare’s 105 million points of interest in more than 190 countries as well as the 100 million devices to which Foursquare commands access. Placed CEO David Shim will drop that title and become president of Foursquare. Under the new arrangement, Snap will continue to rely on Placed as an attribution partner.
For Foursquare, the partnership represents an opportunity to double down on a massive set of first-party data at a time when tenuous ad tech solutions tied to third-party data sets are facing unprecedented scrutiny. Foursquare has built up 13 billion consumer confirmations to validate its location data, and Placed has collected 135 million survey responses from its rewards app.
As ad tech faces tougher times and a privacy-driven crackdown on data collection and ad targeting practices, more mergers and acquisitions are likely to transform the industry’s terrain. Teaming up and stockpiling as much first-party data as possible, thereby eliminating the need for less compliant modes of data harvesting, will boost the longevity of some firms while others flounder.
