Founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai in 2009, the company rose to prominence with the launch of its local search-and-discovery mobile app.

Alongside additions and iterations to its consumer apps, the company also began to create products that leverage the location data collected via billions of check-ins.

[10] In May 2014, the company launched Swarm, a companion app to Foursquare City Guide, that moved the social networking and location sharing aspects of the service to a separate application.

[12] In April 2015, Foursquare began offering location-based enterprise products for marketers and advertisers with the launch of Pinpoint.

[25][26] On November 5, 2020 it was announced that David Shim was stepping down as Chief Executive Officer, to be replaced by Gary Little, a member of the company's board.

[39] Launched in March 2009, Foursquare City Guide is a local search and discovery mobile app that helps users discover new places from a community of peers.

[42] The app gave users the opportunity to earn points to be redeemed for gift cards in exchange for enabling background location services.

Launched in May 2016, Marsbot was a location-aware tool that sent context-based suggestions about nearby places to eat and drink via text, tailored to users' preferences.

Launched in May 2023,[46] it was designed to unify Foursquare’s product suite and utilize the H3 grid system in order to minimize the time and resources necessary to extract business insights from location-based queries.

Foursquare Places is a database of venue information representing 120+ million commercial points-of-interest (POI) across 200+ countries and territories.

[48] The Foursquare Places API enables developers to integrate location-aware capabilities directly into their apps for services such as delivery, navigation, ride-share, and shopping.

Foursquare Studio allows users to join large-scale data of diverse shapes and sizes for analysis through the creation, design, and sharing of interactive maps.

This patent describes a mobile application that offers intelligent venue recommendations based on a user's location history, as well as preferences of their social network and individuals with similar tastes.