This year 2019 looks set to be one of the strongest years with the IPOs of several of the so-called unicorn start-ups (e.g. Pinterest), i.e. those with a valuation in excess of USD 1 trillion.
A few weeks ago Lyft went public with an IPO, the biggest company to go public since Snapchat two years ago. This year looks set to repeat this trend of big companies going public, with Uber, Airbnb and Pinterest being three of the most interesting.
In this article we will try to analyse the latest acquisitions made by Pinterest, and how they have affected or contributed to the parent company.
Getting to know Pinterest
Pinterest is a social network where users can collecting and sharing images, ideas and hobbies, helping to connect all users with things they find interesting.
This is a company that was formed in 2009 as a private network and achieved great growth in 2011, when it went from being an online platform to having an app for iPhones and began to receive large investments in seed rounds in order to allow for scalability and profitability.
Since then it has received 15 funding roundsin which it has succeeded in capturing more than $1,2Bwhich have been used for the constant improvements and upgrades, and for the acquiring a business with complementary products.
Buying companies from Pinterest
Its last 4 mergers and acquisitions have been those analysed below:
1) Jelly HQ
Jelly is a platform that serves as a Q&A forum. The main features that set it apart from other similar platforms such as Quora or ChaCha were the use of images for the resolution of imagesThe project encourages users to use images both to ask questions and to answer them.
2) Instapaper
Instapaper is a bookmarking service that allows its users to save web content for later reading on other devices. It was founded in 2008 by Marco Arment and became an instant success thanks to its simple registration form. It does not require emails and, in addition, in case of having the premium version, it allowed the user to have text reading with artificial voice and the elimination of advertising.
In 2018 Pinterest sold the company to its former owners.
3) Tote
This company was acquired in 2016 and is specialised in the sale of fashion accessorieswhich are advertised through bloggers or influencers.
Unlike other fashion applications, in this case the concept of recommendations comes solely from the hand of stylists, bloggers and influencers including complete collections of recommended clothing and outfits for every occasion.
4) Fleksy
Fleksy is a start-up that has developed a virtual keyboard for mobile phoneswhich improves the efficiency of the keyboards integrated in mobile screens due to its autocorrection system based on region-specific predictive algorithms in which the device is used.
In addition, the keyboard is equipped with technology that can decipher the typing patterns in each application, being able to perform customised recommendations to each application.