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Pinterest Acquires Instapaper to Get Smarter About Articles

Pinterest Acquires Instapaper to Get Smarter About Articles

Pinterest Acquires Instapaper to Get Smarter About Articles
The Pinterest Inc. logo is displayed for a photograph on an Apple iPad (Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- Pinterest Inc. is buying Instapaper, the app that lets you save an article to read later, as it works to understand the technology behind recommending stories for people.

The acquisition of Instapaper, which has expertise in saving, curating and analyzing articles, aligns with Pinterest's goal to provide content that fits users' interests, the company said in a statement. Pinterest declined to comment on a price for the deal.

Instapaper, started in 2008 by Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment, is known for helping people save longer-form stories they don't have time to read. Pinterest said people use its application to save articles, though they often tend to be image-based how-to stories about recipes or from inspirational do-it-yourself blogs. Instapaper's technology could help improve Pinterest's ability to match content with its users' interests.

``Instapaper will work with us to continue building indexing and recommendations technologies,'' Steve Davis, a product manager at Pinterest, said in a statement. 

It's not the first time Instapaper has been sold. Arment sold a majority stake to the New York start-up holding company Betaworks in 2013.

Pinterest, which has more than 100 million users, was last valued at $11 billion in a funding round in March 2015.

To contact the author of this story: Sarah Frier in San Francisco at sfrier1@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew Pollack at apollack1@bloomberg.net.