Pinterest Buys Math Camp To Work On Discovery

Math Camp, the company that created location-based app Highlight and photo sharing app Shorts, is being acquired by Pinterest.

Pinterest announced the acquisition in a deal for which the terms were not disclosed. The cofounder of Math Camp, as well as most of the staff, will be coming along to Pinterest once the deal is complete. The team will be staffed in the engineering, product and design departments at Pinterest, where they will be working on mobile discovery products.

Math Camp is most famous for Highlight, an app it created a few years ago that was popular during the height of the location-based services craze. The app sent notifications to mobile phones when a user was close to another user. It had limited staying power, and a few years later, it unveiled Shorts, which is an app that enables people to meet up based on the photos they take. Math Camp raised $5.5 million in venture funding during its five-year life.

“Pinterest is focused on helping people discover ideas on mobile, the web and in the real world,” said Steve Davis, lead product manager at Pinterest, in a media report. “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.”

Pinterest is on a mission to improve its discovery products, which, in turn, will keep visitors on its website for longer. In addition to improving the website operator’s traditional discovery experience for users, it’s also unveiling tools, like visual search, which enables users to search by choosing things that appear in a picture. Love the shoes the model is wearing? You just have to click on it. In the U.S., it has 87 million users each month, according to comScore, which is 61 percent higher than a year ago. Unconfirmed reports peg the amount advertisers spent on Pinterest last year at $100 million.