Foursquare buys Placed from Snap Inc.

Foursquare just made its first acquisition. The location tech company has acquired Placed from Snap Inc. on the heels of a fresh $150 Million investment led by The Raine Group. Placed is the biggest competitor to foursquare attribution product, which allows brands to track the physical impact of a digital campaign or ad. Up until now, Placed and Attribution by Foursquare combined have measured more than $3 Billion in ad-to-store visits.

Placed launched in 2011 and raised $13.4 million before being acquired by Snap Inc. in 2017. As part of the deal with Foursquare, the company’s Attribution product will henceforth be known as Placed powered by Foursquare. The acquisition also means that Placed powered by Foursquare will have more than 450 measurable media partners, including Twitter, Snap, Pandora and Waze. Moreover, more than 50% of the Fortune 100 companies are partnered with Placed or Foursquare.

It’s also worth noting that this latest investment of $150 million is the biggest financing round for Foursquare ever, and comes following a $33 million Series F last year. That last bit, about an independent location technology platform, is important here. Foursquare is 10 years old and has transformed from a consumer-facing location check-in app — a game, really — into location analytics and development platform.

The Pilgrim SDK fits into that top item on the list: developer tools. The Pilgrim SDK allows developers to embed location-smart experiences and notifications into their apps and services. But it also expands Foursquare’s access to data from beyond its own apps to the greater ecosystem, yielding the data it needs to power analytics tools for brands and publishers. With this acquisition, Placed will be able to leverage Foursquare’s existing map of 105 million places of interest across 190 countries, as well as tap into the measured U.S. audience of more than 100 million monthly devices.