Internet group Naver and Simon Ventures, the corporate venturing subsidiary of property developer Simon, have co-led the $25m first close of a series F round for US-based location intelligence platform Foursquare.
The first tranche was co-led with venture capital firm Union Square Ventures (USV), and Foursquare expects to close the round at $33m by the end of 2018. Investment banking firm Morgan Stanley and Pitango Growth, investment firm Pitango’s growth-stage fund, also invested.
Foursquare runs a local intelligence offering consisting of two products with a total of 50 million monthly active users: a local recommendation app called Foursquare City Guide and a data logging app called Swarm which tracks every place a user goes.
The company also supplies its location data technology to a wide range of app developers and mobile device producers including Apple, Uber, Twitter, Microsoft and Samsung.
Jeff Glueck, Foursquare’s CEO, said the series F capital is intended to expand its research and development activities and engineering team, as it seeks to integrate its technology into more channels. The new cash increased the company’s overall funding to approximately $265m.
USV has backed Foursquare since its $1.4m series A round in 2009, investing alongside O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures (OATV), the corporate venturing arm of media company O’Reilly, and assorted angel investors.
The two joined Andreessen Horowitz for a $20m series B round in 2010 that valued Foursquare at $95m pre-money, and all three took part in a $50m series C the following year with Spark Capital, valuing the company at $600m.
Silver Lake Partners led a $41m convertible debt round in 2013 that included the four existing investors, before Capital Group and DFJ Growth added $35m in series D funding at a reported $650m valuation later the same year.
The series D valuation had almost halved to $330m by Foursquare’s $45m series E round in early 2016, which was led by USV and backed by Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners, DFJ Growth, Andreessen Horowitz and Spark Capital.
