Pinterest has acquired the image recognition and visual search startup VisualGraph to improve its search functionality.
On Monday, the pin-board-like photo-sharing app reportedly bought VisualGraph, thus, making its founder Kevin Jing and co-worker David Liu a part of Pinterest's engineering team.
On the startup's website, Jing announced, "Today we couldn't be more excited to announce that we are joining Pinterest!" - "we" doesn't include the other founder of VisualGraph, David Wei Cai.
In the site, Jing just thanked his co-founder for building the company with him and writing "some of the core code."
Jing, CEO of Visualgraph, was a former engineer at Google Inc. He was part of a team that helped build some of the Internet giant's first machine vision applications. Liu, on the other hand, also attended the internships at Google and Facebook. He has recently finished his master's degree in computer science at Stanford University.
Pinterest said that its acquisition and union with VisualGraph will bring its users to the other extent of online scrapbooking.
"The acquisition of VisualGraph will help us build technology to better understand what people are Pinning," a spokes person for Pinterest said in an e-mail to Reuters. "By doing so, we hope to make it easier for people to find the things they love."
Pinterest declined to comment further on the buyout. It didn't even disclosed terms of the deal.
However, judging on the looks of the VisualGraph's site, the merger of these technologies could possibly drive changes for the photo app's users.
"On Pinterest, millions of people are curating and sharing billions of Pins everyday. And these Pins are more than just images -- they link to contents that can inspire and enrich people's lives," stated Jing. "We are excited for the opportunity to combine machine vision with human vision and curation, and to build a visual discovery experience that is both aesthetically appealing and immensely useful for people everywhere."
