Foursquare Valued Over $250 Million
Foursquare labs, the owner of Foursquare has been valued at $250 million after its first round of financing. This will be followed with a second round of financing which will be held some time in the coming months, which will further add to the value of this website.
Foursquare helps users to broadcast their locations and whereabouts to all its friends and share other friend’s whereabouts. The service has reached more than $6 million active users. Naveen Selvadurain, the Co founder of Foursquare announced that it the second round of financing will be held sometime this year. He also announced that the company has no plans of offering an IPO to the general public anytime soon.
The website is growing at a rapid pace with the number of users constantly growing each day. It is predicted that the number of users will increase to 10 million by the middle of the year in June. The website draws big revenues from big brands to place advertisements in its location based service. It has currently close to 120 employees and is expecting to double this number.
In the recent months Foursquare has received a lot of attention from the media and competition from other major players on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Facebook has launched Facebook Places which is similar to what is offered by FourSquare. Twitter too has launched location based tagging in its messages to add a geo location to tweets which will let others know were one is. Foursquare is aiming at involving more local businesses to help people find more place to hang out, eat and watch movies at. It has signed on with some major brands whose ads are currently running on the service pages. It has advertising deals with companies such as Safeway Inc (NYSE:SWY), PepsiCo (NYSE:PEP) Inc, Zagat Survey LLC. More than 60 percent of the website’s users are signed up in United States.
In the recent months a lot of major websites have been valued after multiple rounds of financing. Recently Facebook has reached a valuation of $50 billion after some major rounds of financing held by Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) and others. Morgan Stanley helped the world’s biggest social networking site a billion dollars in private funding from non-U.S based investors. Twitter has been valued at $4.1 billion after it ran a number of financial rounds of its own. Groupon recently closed a round of 950 million financing which values the daily deals website at $4.75 billion.
