It's Official: Foursquare Gets a $20M Venture Round
It’s official: Highly-hyped location-based startup Foursquare just closed on a $20 million round of funding at a $95 million pre-money valuation. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with previous investors O’Reilly AlphaTech and Union Square Ventures also participating. Foursquare famously materialized from the vestiges of Dodgeball, a mobile service cofounded by Dennis Crowley, who sold the company to Google in 2005. When the search giant killed the service, Crowley, who'd logged roughly two years at Google, quit and quickly revived the idea. Today, the 18-month-old company employs 27 people and has attracted 1.7 million users. It’s also in a race against a growing number of location-based services, including those of Gowalla and Loopt, and soon to include Twitter and possibly Facebook. A few moments ago, I talked with Marc Andreessen about why his venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz, was so hot on the deal despite all that competition, whether he or Ben Horowitz use FourSquare, and how he’ll reconcile his involvement with the startup with his role as a director at Facebook, which is widely believed to be developing its own location-based service. Read the Q&A after the jump...
