There was a lot of action surrounding the first seed round of funding for Foursquare, the location-based social network. From what we’ve heard, there were a number of investors upset that they couldn’t get in on the round, which was relatively small at $1.35 million. But what we didn’t know was everyone who was involved in the round, but more names continue to come out.
While Foursquare eventually disclosed that the main investors were Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, there were a set of individual angel investors that the company wouldn’t talk about. Last week, it was revealed that one of those investors was Twitter creator Jack Dorsey. Another is Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley’s former partner at his last startup Dodgeball, Alex Rainert. Both of those are confirmed. Ron Conway and Delicious founder Joshua Schachter are believed to have participated as well. And now a fifth has just outed himself: Digg founder Kevin Rose.
Rose revealed his investment during his presentation at FOWA in London. (Which itself is rather interesting, titled “9 Ways To Take Your Site From One To One Million Users” — kind of like the post he did for us, 10 Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers.)
Foursquare is proving to have quite an impressive roster of investors. Meanwhile, the service may or may not have gotten a shout-out in The Simpsons the other day. The key to the scene is that the episode was apparently heavy with social network references, such as Twitter and Facebook. Even though they do appear to be talking about the actual game of four square, it may be a sly reference. Those chattering about it on Twitter seem convinced.
Update: And here’s the official list of angels. As you can see, all the ones we named are on there, with the two others being Chad Stoller and Sergio Salvatore, two men close to the company that have helped out along the way.
[photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]