Foursquare Checks in for $20 Million

Tweet

Courtesy company

Foursquare, like Twitter before it, is increasingly looking like one of those dumb little ideas that might just be brilliant. The New York City start-up, which makes telling your friends about the bars and restaurants you visit a fun little game, has raise a boatload of venture capital. From TechCrunch:

Foursquare, the geo-mobile startup everybody tried to invest in or buy, now has officially closed its Series B funding round. The “wire transfer heard 'round the world,' as board member Bryce Roberts puts it, was for $20 million, giving the company a $95 million pre-money valuation.

The investors were Andreessen Horowitz, O'Reilly Alpha Tech, and Union Square.

The move, which was widely anticipated, gives Foursquare a chance to turn itself into a standalone business, rather than selling out to a big social network like Yahoo or Facebook. That was the approach that co-founder Dennis Crowley took with his last start-up, which he sold to Google and which ended badly.

Read more:

Max Chafkin

Senior writer Max Chafkin has profiled companies such as Yelp, Zappos, Twitter, Threadless, and Tesla for the magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Sign-up for our Start-up Newsletter

Email Address: