Pinterest Buys Content Organizer Icebergs

Putting its recent $200 million capital raise to use, Pinterest just bought Icebergs -- a Barcelona-based start-up that specializes in content-organizing and sharing tools.

That means Icebergs’ own service will shut down on September 1, and co-founders César Isern and Albert Pereta are headed for Pinterest’s product management and design teams.

“Much of what they built at Icebergs is in line with the visual discovery and curation tools we're building,” a Pinterest spokeswoman said on Thursday, referring to Isern and Pereta.

Icebergs’ community -- referred to individually as “penguins” -- will be given the opportunity to export their content, while Pinterest assures none of it will be lost.

A cross between a social network and a visual search engine, Pinterest has established itself as one of the Web’s more popular sites.

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This year, about 40 million users are expected to visit Pinterest at least once a month -- nearly 16% more than a year ago -- according to eMarketer. Pinterest also claimed about 750 million boards on its platform, with 30 billion pins about travelers, foodies and more.

Following the lead of Web giants like Google and Facebook, Pinterest recently added a self-service component to its Promoted Pins ad product.

Despite its aggressive monetization efforts, however, Pinterest recently decided to take another $200 million in capital at a valuation of $5 billion.

The money was earmarked for further investment in technology and talent to develop Pinterest into a discovery platform, including the expansion of its Guided Search service.

Icebergs represents the company’s fifth acquisition to date, following the addition of culinary community Punchfork; review aggregator app Livestar; coding competition site Hackermeter; and image recognition and visual search startup Visual Graph.

The company is also focused on international growth and additional monetization.

Worldwide, Pinterest says it is now available in 31 countries, while international users represent about 30% of its total audience.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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