It’s been a big, transformative year for location-focused app Foursquare. For the past year, Foursquare has been making both incremental and monumental shifts in the core functionality of the app, taking it from just another check-in game to a real local search and discovery platform – one that can truly compete with the likes of Yelp, Google Places, and more in the crowded field.
And in a recent blog post from CEO Dennis Crowley, we learn two interesting numbers to close out Foursquare’s year. First, Crowley says that the service has climbed to 45 million users (up from 40 million a few months ago). Second, Foursquare has just secured $35 million in Series D funding.
“To help us keep building our vision, we’re also happy today to announce that two new firms are investing $35 million in a Series D fundraise in Foursquare – DFJ Growth and Capital Group (via their SMALLCAP World Fund). In addition, Barry Schuler, Managing Director of DFJ Growth and former CEO of AOL, will join our board. This investment means that we can build our vision even faster. And that you guys are going to see a lot more from our team,” says Crowley.
The company’s last round of funding came back in April when Silver Lake Waterman, as well as existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Spark Capital, and Union Square Ventures pumped $41 million into it.
Other numbers? Foursquare has seen 40 million tips and over 5 billion check-ins. Back at the beginning of the year, Foursquare could only tout 3 billion check-ins.
Like I said before, there were a bunch of incremental changes that Foursquare made over the course of the year that rounded out their recommendation engine – but one of the major changes came in April when Foursquare released version 6.0, which provided the first true local search a recommendation experience that the service had ever offered.
Another came more recently when Foursquare began pushing real-time, passive recommendations to all users with version 7.0. Crowley says he’s most proud of this.
A fresh $35M in the bank, 6 diff $$ products all working well & passive recs *finally* working – 2014 is going to be HUGE for @Foursquare 🙂
— Dennis Crowley (@dens) December 19, 2013
And it’s clear that he’s optimistic about the new year.