Much has changed at Foursquare Labs Inc. in the past few years. The company, which started out by providing a check-in app that allowed users to broadcast their trips, now sells location-based analytics and development tools to brands.

Foursquare late Thursday revealed that it has raised a $150 million investment led by merchant bank The Raine Group LLC to grow its enterprise business. The company has wasted no time putting the new capital to use. In conjunction with the funding announcement, Foursquare disclosed that it had inked a deal to buy Snap Inc.’s competing Placed location analytics business.

Placed is the company’s main rival in this market. It sells a cloud-based service that enables retailers, restaurant chains and other businesses to measure how much foot traffic ads drive to their locations. Placed provides insight into the number of additional customers who drop by after a campaign, as well as related information such as what percentage of visitors make a purchase.

Foursquare will merge the service with its competing Foursquare Attribution offering. The combined platform, which is set to launch in the coming months, will pair the former Snap subsidiary’s analytics features with the location data Foursquare gathers from its consumer apps. The company discontinued its hallmark check-in feature way back in 2014 but continues to provide a pair of services that recommend places of interest for users and include certain social features.

“Placed will leverage Foursquare’s global map of 105 million POIs [points of interest] across over 190 countries and can immediately tap into Foursquare’s measured audience in the U.S. of over 100 million monthly devices,” Foursquare Chief Executive Jeff Glueck (pictured, right, with Placed CEO David Shim) wrote in a blog post.

The combined company will have more than $100 million in annual revenue with a customer base spanning 1,500-plus brands. Over the past 12 months, Foursquare and Placed analyzed a combined 250 million online ads for their clients, which the companies say represents $3 billion in media spend.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Snap shelled out $135 million to buy Placed in 2017 and the location analytics provider’s user base has only grown since then, which makes it quite likely that Foursquare is paying a nine-figure sum as well.

Photo: Fourquare