Naveen Selvadurai founded Foursquare raises $20 Million
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New York: Foursquare, a location based services company has raised $20 million in a second round funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Dennis Crowley, who founded the company with a fellow entrepreneur, Naveen Selvadurai, said the fresh cash would largely be used to develop its technology infrastructure, expand its staff of nearly 30 employees and relocate to office space in New York, where the company is based. Since its inception in March 2009, Foursquare has amassed more than 1.8 million users and claims it is adding new ones at the rate of roughly 10,000 a day. Foursquare is rapidly becoming a marketing force, with 10,000 businesses forging partnerships with the company, including Starbucks, New York Times and Bravo TV. The area of geo-commerce is set to dominate social media, with Facebook making noises about including geo-location functionality in its service while Twitter has unveiled its Places applications that allows people to include geographic information with their tweets. On the $20m funding, Crowley said having Silicon Valley legends Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz as investors is pivotal. "They know better than anyone how to transform start-ups into successful organisations. As we continue to rapidly expand to take advantage of the opportunities in front of us, Ben and Marc's expertise in growing companies will be invaluable." Crowley said that with the new round of financing, Foursquare's main priority will be to expand the organisation and build a world-class engineering organization to develop the next generation of mobile, social and local products, especially for the business world. "It's been a crazy year for us and we're expecting the next 12 months to be even more of an adventure. Look forward to greater product from us soon... we're really just getting started," Crowley said.

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