Pinterest builds image-recognition and visual-search products (including Lens) layered onto its discovery-focused social network and sells advertising that aims to convert discovery into purchases. The company reported 175 million monthly active users and says 60% of users are outside the U.S. It generates "hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue," according to reporting, and is pitching advertisers on ads powered by its visual search technology. Pinterest is making a full-court press on visual recognition as a differentiator versus Facebook and Google and has launched its first U.S. ad campaign to expand its user and advertiser base. International expansion and adapting to different market behaviors are cited as key priorities as it scales. The company positions visual search as a way to catch users during intent-driven discovery and push them toward purchases. Pinterest is a social-sharing startup. The company recently added $186M to its Series G, bringing that round to $553M at an $11 billion valuation. It is also conducting a secondary sale that lets employees sell a small portion of vested shares at the $11 billion price. New investors in the round include Wellington Management Company and Goldman Sachs, and existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer, First Mark, SV Angel, Valiant, and Fidelity also participated. Pinterest has raised about $1.3 billion in total since being founded in 2009. This is the company's second employee secondary offering, the first having been held in October 2012. Pinterest is a social platform built around user-shared visual "pins," which the company says have reached 30 billion total with half shared in the prior six months. Its core product is the pin-based feed where users discover and save content. Pinterest is testing monetization via Promoted Pins, initially sold on a CPM basis to large brand advertisers and now expanding to a self-serve, performance-based (cost-per-click) product for small and medium-sized businesses. The self-serve offering includes an auction-based component for bidding on categories and search terms, and Pinterest manually reviews Promoted Pins to ensure quality. Early small-business partners include Artifact Uprising, Food52, and Vineyard Vines, with plans to gradually broaden availability. The company recently closed a large funding round to support these monetization efforts and will need to convert its engaged audience into sustained revenue. Pinterest operates a visual discovery service used to save and share ideas and inspiration. The company is investing heavily in international expansion — it has hired country managers in Italy, France and England, launched in the UK, France and Italy, and plans to launch in ten more countries before year-end after 125 percent international growth since the start of the year. Mobile has become the dominant platform, growing 50 percent since the beginning of the year to represent more than three‑quarters of all usage. Pinterest is developing monetization, which began testing earlier this month and the company intends to expand into a global program. Capital from the new round will also be used to acquire talent and technology (including small firms, largely via stock transactions with some cash), and to invest in technical infrastructure to make the service faster and more reliable. CEO Ben Silbermann described the funding as enabling the company to pursue its goal of being a service that inspires users' future decisions. Pinterest is a web platform that lets users collect and organize pictures into themed boards and browse pins and boards created by others. The company was co-founded in March 2010 by Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra and is based in San Francisco, CA. In the reported round the company received new capital that values it at $2.5bn. Pinterest said it will use the funding to build new features, improve its infrastructure, hire new people and pursue strategic technology acquisitions. The platform’s core product centers on visual discovery and curation via user-created boards. No operating metrics (revenue/users) were provided in the article.

Total raised

$1.1B

Funding rounds

7

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jun 2017