Mergers and Acquisitions: Pinterest Acquires Kosei
- Target: Kosei
- Consideration: Not Disclosed
- Date Announced: January 21, 2015
In mergers and acquisitions news, Pinterest announced earlier this year that it acquired Kosei, a small startup that specializes in product recommendations. Kosei’s technology allows for personalized product recommendations and more targeted accurate suggestions of items of interest to consumers. According to the Pew Research Center Social Medial Update 2014, Pinterest saw a significant increase in the past year in the proportion of online users to their site, however only 17% of users visit the site daily. Pinterest is hoping to leverage the Kosei technology to provide its users with more useful walls of pins, which would then lead to users visiting Pinterest more often and staying longer on the site.
The Kosei acquisition is an example of a micro acquisition (See: What is a Micro Acquisition?); the company is early stage, having been founded in April 2014, and has a small number of team members, including Lance Riedel and Jure Leskovec, both of whom are considered experts in machine learning.
Pinterest has engaged in a steady stream of acquisitions, with the Kosei acquisition marking the 6th acquisition for Pinterest thus far. Many of these other acquisitions are micro acquisitions, such as the acquisition of Icebergs and Hackermeter, which were also early stage companies having a small number of team members.
Pinterest appears to be sticking to a micro acquisition formula to expand its discovery service, mobile application and talent pool, and it will be interesting to see if this approach continues and if the other large social media platforms adopt the same approach.