Pinterest acquires Math Camp to drive mobile discovery

Math Camp, the company behind apps such as Highlight and Shorts, will be shutting down

With so much of its attention focused on shopping and commerce, Pinterest has become all about discovery, and getting people to the right content so they can find things to buy. That is especially true on mobile, where the company is starting to incorporate visual search, allowing users to highlight products that appear online, as well as in the real world, in order to drive sales. 

With that in mind, Pinterest has acquired mobile app developer Math Camp, it was announced on Thursday.

This is another acqui-hire by the company, as 10 employees, representing  "the majority of the team," will be coming to work at Pinterest. That includes Paul Davison, Founder and CEO of Math Camp, along with co-founder Ben Garrett. 

Founded in 2011, Math Camp is the company behind apps like Highlight, Shorts and Roll. Highlight is a mobile ambient awareness app that sends the user a push notification when they are near another Highlight user. Shorts is an iOS app that allows users to follow their friends' camera rolls, and Roll is an app that makes it faster to share photos from a camera roll.

Pinterest is not acquiring any of Math Camp's technology, and the company will "sunset its apps in the coming weeks," a Pinterest spokesperson told me, though the company will also open-source a wide range of libraries and frameworks, "so that the developer community can benefit from their engineering work."

Instead, Pinterest is making his acquisition to incorporate the team's experience developing mobile discovery products, bringing that to its engineering, product and design teams.

For Math Camp, there was "a lot of mission alignment" with Pinterest, according to Paul Davison, founder of Math Camp.

"When you can help people discover the world around them and connect them with others who share their interests, it just makes life better. We’re excited to extend our learnings around recommendations as well as visual and real-world discovery to the millions of people who use Pinterest to find new ideas and do things they love," he said.

Pinterest is not saying what the Math Camp team will work on, specifically, but it would seem to be a good fit with the company's efforts in visual search, given the team's experience with mobile discovery, particularly with Highlight.

In November of last year, Pinterest debuted the ability to zoom in on and select objects in a photo, which they could then search for. For example, if there was a picture of a table, they could zoom in on a lamp in the corner instead, to find out where to buy it.

More recently, Pinterest updated the app to do that automatically, meaning that when someone opens a photo, they will right away see a list of all the items in the image that they can search for.

Even cooler: Pinterest is developing technology so users can do the same thing in the real world. All they'd have to do is take a picture of something, and Pinterest will give them a recommendation on where to find it. They would even be able do the same thing for multiple items in the same photo. 

"Pinterest is focused on helping people discover ideas on mobile, the Web and in the real world. The team behind Math Camp are experts in building innovative mobile products to connect people with similar tastes and help them discover day-to-day images and video across platforms," Steve Davis, lead product manager at Pinterest, said in a statement provided to VatorNews.

"We welcome their years of experience across engineering, product and design as we build the world’s catalog of ideas."

Math Camp was founded in 2011 and ​raised $5.5 million in two rounds from Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), Benchmark, Greycroft Partners, SV Angel, Betaworks, CrunchFund, Slow Ventures and numerous angel investors in Silicon Valley and New York.

This is Pinterest's fourth acquisition of 2016, and, interestingly, every single one has so far been an acqui-hire.

It first brought over Daniel Nordh, the founder of design app Curator, in April, before hiring the team behind URX, a mobile deeplinking provider, in May. It also purchased the team from smart keyboard app Fleksy in June. Most recently, the company acquired the team behind shopping app tote.