Microsoft invests $15 million in Foursquare, strikes licensing deal

Even as Satya Nadella is taking over the reins of Microsoft from Steve Ballmer as CEO, the company has announced a major partnership. Microsoft has brought a $15 million stake in Foursquare and will be licensing the location service’s places database for use in its products and services. The Foursquare team made the big announcement on a blog post and also announced that its crowd-sourced database is seeing big numbers. It has over 60 million entries and 5 billion check-ins. This is pretty big news for Foursquare’s partners and will also be heartening for Microsoft, who has just pumped in massive money into helping Foursquare turn its location-based mobile app into a sustainable business. The $15 million that Microsoft will be putting into Foursquare will be added to the $350 million the company raised in an investment round last year in December. Back then Foursquare was being valued in at $650 million. Foursquare went on to explain that Microsoft’s products like Bing, Windows and Windows Phone operating systems will see enhanced location sharing through the app. Essentially, Foursquare will help provide Windows users with the most contextually-aware experiences and recommendations of pretty much any service in the world. So it's a give-and-take relationship. Microsoft and Foursquare have signed a multi-year contract in order to license the service. The company has not revealed the monetary aspect of this contract but it is certain that Microsoft has become Foursquare’s single biggest data licensee with this move. However, the deal is not an exclusive one and will not change the contracts and commitments Foursquare already has with other companies.