Pinterest Is Now Worth $5 Billion

The company raised $200 million in a funding round, a spokesperson confirmed to BuzzFeed. ReadWrite first reported the funding round a few minutes before it was officially announced.

Handout / Reuters

Pinterest has raised $200 million in additional funding in a round which valued the company — which is widely seen as best-positioned to improve discovery of content on the Web — at $5 billion.

What that means is Pinterest essentially added $1.2 billion to its valuation between its current funding round and the last round, where it raised $225 million at a $3.8 billion valuation in October last year. In that same time span, Pinterest rolled out its new search engine, Guided Search, and also began testing its advertising products through Promoted Pins.

In particular, the launch of Guided Search — a sort of visually-oriented search engine that is more like a flow chart than the kind of keyword search that Google specializes in — has been an event investors in the company have been salivating over since the company began gaining traction. Search wasn't even on the company's road map until December last year, according to Pinterest designer Jason Wilson — so the billion-plus valuation jump in such a short time span makes a bit more sense.

That's a hefty sum to add to its war chest, considering Pinterest had prior to the round $564 million. Still, raising money — especially when the company is able to with no revenue — helps startups like Pinterest attract high-quality talent and make acquisitions, such as its acquisition of visual search engine VisualGraph.

Pinterest is widely considered in the investor community to have the best crack at helping users discover things — whether it's video, products, or even locations — on the web. That has natural commerce applications, too, if advertisers are able to place certain products in front of the right people at the right time. For example, a pin for a Darth Vader outfit from a costume shop might be promoted in a search for "halloween," according to the company.

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