Instapaper, the company behind an app that lets users bookmark articles to read later, is the latest to be acquired by Pinterest, for an undisclosed sum.
“Instapaper will work with us to continue building indexing and recommendations technologies,” Steve Davis, a product manager at Pinterest, said.
Instapaper said “joining Pinterest provides us with additional resources and experience”, adding that there is a lot of overlap between the two companies.
The app lets users “discover, save and experience” interesting web content.
Three years ago it was acquired by media tech company Betaworks, and since then has introduced features such as highlights, text-to-speech, and speed reading.
“We’re excited to take those learnings to Pinterest’s discovery products. We’ll also be experimenting with using our parsing technology for certain Rich Pin types,” it said in a blog.
The Instapaper team will move from Betaworks in New York City to Pinterest’s headquarters in San Francisco, and the app will remain as a standalone product.
However, the firm’s developer product Instaparser will shut down on 1 November 2016.
Pinterest has been on a spree of acquisitions this year. In June, it “acquihired” the team behind Tote, an app used to discover and shop, shortly after a similar move involving smart keyboard app Fleksy.
A month before that it acquired the team behind URX, a mobile advertising platform designed to help users discover content inside apps.
Pinterest, which has more than 100 million users, was last valued at $11 billion in a funding round in March 2015, according to Bloomberg.
Last week, the app maker launched its promoted video product for businesses, coupled with featured pins below the video, citing the fact that 75 per cent of the content viewed by users on Pinterest comes from businesses.
“Now the 67 per cent of people who say videos on Pinterest inspire them to take action can experience your brand and then simply click below to do more with your products and services,” it said.
In the last year alone, Pinterest saw a 60 per cent increase in videos on Pinterest featuring topics like workouts, home projects and hair and beauty tutorials.
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