Pinterest acquires recipe sharing Punchfork
The social site makes its first purchase, choosing the food recipe bookmarking network.
Pinterest announced its first acquisition today and it's one for the foodies: Punchfork, a visual bookmarking site focused on sharing recipes.
Punchfork CEO Jeff Miller said he is joining the engineering team at Pinterest and shutting down the Punchfork site and apps soon.
"Initially, support for Punchfork will continue, but we will soon be retiring the Punchfork site, API and mobile apps," Miller wrote in a note to the Punchfork community. "We believe that a unified destination benefits our users in the long run, and the Punchfork team will focus on contributing to Pinterest as the premier platform for discovering and sharing new recipes and other interests on the web."
The Punchfork site, which uses social network data like tweets, Facebook shares, and Pinterst pins as well as ratings to help users find recipes, launched in 2011. It's unclear how many members the Punchfork site has. The company also powers an app for Evernote.
Food pins accounts for 11.6 percent of the most popular pins on Pinterest as of November, according to Pinterest analytics company Repinly, making food pins the most popular type of pin on the site. (The next highest percentage, 30.4 percent, belongs to the miscellaneous category.)
Pinterest was one of the fastest growing sites of 2012 with ComScore last logging it at more than 25 million visitors in September. The company raised $100 million in May from several investors -- including Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital -- with Japan's largest e-commerce site Rakuten taking the lead in funding.