Naveen Co-Founded foursquare raises $50 Million
Printer Print Email Email
Naveen Co-Founded foursquare raises $50 Million
Santa Clara: New York-based foursquare, a mobile location-based start-up, has succeeded in raising $50 million in a round of funding led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. It also involved O'Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. With the current round of funding, the company is valued at about $600 million, reports TechCrunch. The firm has earlier raised $20 million about a year ago and angel funding in the year 2009. It was co-founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai in 2007. Working from Dennis' kitchen table in New York's East Village, they began building the first version of foursquare in fall 2008 and launched it at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas in March 2009. Currently they have 10 million users which helps people check in at restaurants and more places with their smartphones. Recently the company has signed a deal with American Express. The fund will be utilized to hire engineers in New York and San Francisco who will work on to build out foursquare's existing services such as the foursquare Merchant Platform. It is a platform that allows businesses to provide discounts to Foursquare users and gives them data on when people check in at their business and how regularly. With over 400,000 businesses using the Merchant Platform, the company has a check-ins of over three million per day and over 600 million check-ins in total. They have around 70 employees between headquarters in New York and a satellite engineering office in San Francisco. Naveen Selvadurai, the co-founder of foursquare, holds a master's degree in computer science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Prior to founding foursquare, he was Lead Architect at Socialight and was a Senior Software Architect with the Global Digital Business group at Sony Music Entertainment. There he used to oversee and develop various applications that dealt with content management and distribution of mobile products and was the lead developer of Sony's Music Box mobile application. Before Sony, he consulted for New York-based Run Tones and as a software engineering stints at Sun Microsystems and Lucent Technologies.

siliconindia