Other investors included Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners, DFJ Growth, Andreessen Horowitz and Spark Capital.
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Dennis Crowley, the company’s founder and CEO, has stepped into a new role: Executive chairman of the company, with COO Jeff Glueck taking over as CEO. Foursquare also announced on Thursday it has raised $45 million in a Series E funding round, cutting by half its $650 million valuation of 2013.
Rumors of Foursquare raising money from a new round of funding and consequently reducing its valuation had been swirling since last month.
Dennis Crowley is stepping down as chief executive of Foursquare Inc. after struggling to turn the location-sharing mobile app into a moneymaking business over the seven years since he founded it.
It is hard to gulp this as a positive news, the company CEO after 6 years has resigned, its valuation is going down by the day etc. Dennis insisted that the company is doing good and has a “scalable revenue growth”. Earlier the company had planned a funding round in December 2015 in between $20 million and $40 million with only one investor with the company value at $250 million.
“I’ve asked our COO Jeff Glueck to step into the role of CEO, and I’ve tapped our CRO Steven Rosenblatt to be President, acting as Jeff’s co-pilot”, said Crowley. Crowley will remain at the company full-time as executive chairman, focusing more on developing new products.
Speaking to VentureBeat, Crowley also downplayed any concerns that Foursquare may be doomed following the shakeups. And there are a lot of things that should exist in the world that only Foursquare can build-for both consumers and app developers. “We have been building our location intelligence company over the past 18 months, and we have seen tremendous success [while] the company just had our best month, quarter, and year in company history”.
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The bulk of Foursquares revenue now comes from selling products built on the companys location data to other businesses, Glueck said in an interview.
