Infillion checked in with its latest acquisition on Friday: Foursquare.
Apparently, if there’s a strategically interesting or distressed ad tech asset on the market, Infillion will find it. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Rob Emrich, Infillion’s CEO, told Axios, which broke the news, that it will remain an “active acquirer” as clients increasingly opt for an omnichannel platform over point solutions.
“Active acquirer” is a bit of an understatement.
Before rebranding to Infillion in 2022, the company absorbed CTV ad platform TrueX, location data companies Fysical and Gimbal, OOH platform InStadium and managed services shop UberMedia. It also bought cross-device provider Drawbridge’s media business. Then came a biggie. Infillion bought MediaMath out of bankruptcy in 2023 for $22 million. Finally, in February, it acquired retail purchase data company Catalina.
And now, Foursquare.
Foursquare, revisited
Founded in 2009, Foursquare was once best known as the app that let you compete with friends for “mayor” status at your local coffee shop. But the zeitgeist moved on and most people stopped thinking about Foursquare around 2012.
But that doesn’t mean Foursquare didn’t keep chugging along, albeit in a different direction.
The company spun its check-in feature into a standalone app called Swarm in 2014 and then spent the better part of the next decade quietly rebuilding itself as a B2B location intelligence business.
In 2019, it acquired attribution company Placed from Snap. Then, in 2020, it merged with location data company Factual, creating a combined entity with more than $150 million in revenue. By that point, the consumer app was basically a footnote.
Today, Foursquare covers more than 100 million points of interest across 200 countries, with data drawn from 250 million US devices and 16 billion human-verified check-ins. Apple Maps, Uber, Snapchat and Spotify are customers, as are all the major agency holding companies.
In short, Foursquare essentially became location infrastructure, which is why Infillion was interested in it.
From mayors to data layers
Foursquare will keep operating under its own brand name and, according to Axio, continue selling data to third-party customers – for now, at least.
That was the same assurance Infillion made with Catalina, although the company also told AdExchanger at the time that Catalina data would eventually only be exclusively available through its own platform.
Either way, the strategic rationale behind both the Catalina and Foursquare deals is the same.
“Marketers have been trying to prove that their advertising drives real-world outcomes for decades,” Emrich said in a press release. “Walled gardens and retailer apps can only measure what happens inside their own environments.”
The pitch is that Catalina and Foursquare together give Infillion a broader view of what people do in the physical world. It’s an attribution story more than anything. Catalina knows what someone bought and Foursquare knows where they went.
But what’ll happen to Foursquare’s consumer-facing apps? In addition to Swarm, Foursquare also owns Superlocal, an AI-powered map and local discovery app it acquired last year.
Infillion says it’s evaluating options, including potentially open-sourcing the models and pursuing strategic relationships.
Their fate is more than just a function of nostalgia for a simpler time when being the mayor of a coffee shop meant something. Foursquare’s first-party check-in data is part of what makes its location panel valuable in the first place.
