Pinterest Raises More Money, Fetching a Valuation of $5 Billion!
The business of online scrapbooking is getting more valuable — at least in the eyes of investors.
Pinterest said on Thursday that it has raised $200 million in a new round of fundraising, at a valuation of $5 billion. At that level, the social network has joined the upper echelons of the start-up hierarchy.
The money will come from existing investors: SV Angel, Bessemer Venture Partners, Fidelity, Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital and Valiant Capital Partners.
Despite some tremors in the market for newly public start-ups, the darlings of the venture capital world have little trouble drawing investor interest. Companies like the home-sharing site Airbnb, the file storage giant Dropbox and the data analysis specialist Palantir have attained valuations approaching or exceeding $10 billion.
Such companies have been eager to draw in as much money as possible, while investors are still in a giving mood.
Now Pinterest is joining the ranks of the start-up superstars. Its latest fundraising round arrives only six months after the social network raised $225 million at a $3.8 billion valuation.
All told, Pinterest has raised $764 million in six rounds of financing.
During that time, the company has expanded its ambitions beyond simply being a repository for users’ saved images, known as pins. It has finally rolled out advertising in the form of “promoted pins” from the likes of Kraft, General Mills and the Gap.
But Pinterest is also no longer content to simply serve as a collection of virtual scrapbooks, no matter how large. (In this case, that’s 750 million user boards featuring 30 billion pins.) It has been building out a search platform that lets users find images based on keywords.
If users search for plants, for example, they will be given guides to help them narrow down their selections like indoor varieties.
“Pinterest has a vision of solving discovery and helping everyone find things they’ll love,” Ben Silbermann, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “This new investment gives us additional resources to realize our vision.”
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