Pinterest worth almost as much as Snapchat, valued at $11B after $367 funding round
Pinterest Inc. announced on Monday, March 16, that they had raised $367 million and are currently seeking up to an additional $211 million. Just last May the company was valued at $5 billion after raising $200. Less than a year later their latest funding round comes at a valuation of $11 billion, placing Pinterest on a short list of the world’s highest valued tech startups.
Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra co-founded the San Francisco-based company in March 2010. If they manage to close the last $211 million funding, they would have raised over a billion dollars in their five-year history.
Previous Pinterest investors Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, have been named on the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. However, according to VentureBeat a Pinterest spokesperson confirmed that there are new investors involved in the latest funding round, but they remain unnamed.
Pinterest will be using this latest round of funding for international expansion, where they have already started making very good progress. Last year their international users increased more than 135 percent. Users outside the U.S. now account for more than 40 percent of all users, up from 28 percent in 2013.
In January, Pinterest started focusing on advertising, with their first offering called the “Promoted Pin”, which allows brands to better advertise their services or products. “We want to make sure Pinterest is a service that’s here to stay for all of us, and advertising helps us ensure that happens.” Pinterest wrote on their blog at the time. Getting started is easy, simply choose the pin you want to promote, decide who sees it, pay when people click through to your website, and then track your campaign.
With their latest valuation of $11 billion, there are only five other privately owned, venture-backed companies worldwide that have a higher valuation than Pinterest. According to The Wall Street Journal’s Billion Dollar Startup Club, these include Xiaomi ($46 billion), Uber ($41.2 billion), Palantir ($15 billion), Snapchat ($15 billion), and SpaceX ($12 billion). Indian online retailer Flipkart has the same valuation as Pinterest.
Image via Pinterest
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