Equity holders in Foursquare received no returns from the company's final acquisition, a co-founder said, even though the company raised $411 million in funding, according to PitchBook data.
Equity holders are the people who own shares, typically investors and employees. The $411M is the total Foursquare took in over its life as a venture-backed company. The co-founder's claim is that none of that ownership turned into a payout when the company was acquired.
Foursquare began in 2009 as a check-in app, where users logged visits to bars and restaurants and collected badges. In 2014 it moved that feature into a separate app, Swarm, and leaned further into location data as a business.
A large fundraising total and a shareholder payout are two different measures. The first records how much investors committed along the way. The second records what came back at the end. In Foursquare's case, the co-founder puts the second figure at zero.