Pinterest lands $5B valuation with $200M in new financing
New funds come eight months after the 4-year-old social-sharing startup closed a $225 million round.
Pinterest confirmed Thursday that it has closed a $200 million round of funding that now values the startup at $5 billion.
News of the new round of funding, which was first reported by ReadWrite, comes just eight months after the company announced a massive $225 million funding round last October that gave it a $3.8 billion valuation. The Series F primary funding round brings the 4-year-old social-sharing company's total funding to $764 million to date.
"Pinterest has a vision of solving discovery and helping everyone find things they'll love," co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann said in a statement shared with CNET. "This new investment gives us additional resources to realize our vision."
Pinterest's valuation increase comes as it attempts to profit from its popular Web and mobile apps, which allow its members to "pin" recipes, photos of clothes, inspirational quotes, and so forth to digital pin-boards. The virtual pinboard plans to use some of the newly acquired funds to further develop its advertising platform, which the service started testing only last year.
One of the advertising programs some of the funds are earmarked for is called " promoted pins" -- ads that pop up in users' search results and category feeds. Launched earlier this month, the program has clients such as Kraft, Target, Gap, General Mills, and Nestle, among others.
San Francisco-based Pinterest also said the new funding would be used to further develop its discovery platform, particularly Guided Search, a new type of search engine the company unveiled last month. Built exclusively for Pinterest's mobile iOS and Android apps, Guided Search lets users filter down a search by tagging it with new layers of specificity that pulls descriptions written by users across the platform.
The round was funded by existing investors SV Angel, Bessemer Venture Partners, Fidelity, Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital, and Valiant Capital Partners, Pinterest said.