Foursquare Boasts 4.5M Users, Opens West Coast Office To Find Engineering Talent

In a blog post titled “We’re Heading West,” location-based social networking giant Foursquare announced it now boasts over 4.5 million users.  In addition, the company announced it’s opening up a permanent office in San Francisco to recruit additional engineering talent.

“In the past year, we had a major growth spurt: from about 100,000 to over 4.5 million users; from a single phone platform to six; from 50-person foursquare flashmobs to 1,000 person epic swarms; and we now have thousands of developers building on the foursquare API,” the company said in its post.  “The biggest challenge: hiring fast enough to support that surge.  Despite growing from 5 employees to 35, we can’t expand as quickly as we want.”

The startup had previously setup a temporary West coast presence out of office space owned by Square — the mobile payments startup founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.  Foursquare says it will remain in its current space, but will be given more room to hire a full team of West Coast engineers in addition to its 35 current employees.  As one of the fastest growing LBS startups around, Foursquare definitely needs the room to grow.  And with an estimated $21.4M in funding, the company has the means to do so quickly.