{"id":9840,"date":"2012-05-17T06:48:37","date_gmt":"2012-05-17T06:48:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/e-commerce\/pinterest_now_worth_15b.html"},"modified":"2022-10-14T18:44:16","modified_gmt":"2022-10-14T22:44:16","slug":"pinterest-now-worth-15b","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/e-commerce\/pinterest-now-worth-15b.html","title":{"rendered":"Pinterest Now Worth $1.5B"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now that was fast – Pinterest just raised $100M at a valuation of $1.5B in a round of funding led by Japanese e-commerce site Rakuten Inc. Pinterest’s existing venture-capital investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners also participated according to<\/a> a press release.<\/p>\n

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Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Rakuten said: “While some may see e-commerce as a straightforward vending machine-like experience, we believe it is a living process where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining. We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest’s vision and Rakuten’s model for e-commerce. Rakuten looks forward to introducing Pinterest to the Japanese market as well as other markets around the world.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And the Japan connection makes sense as I have recently detected a dearth of Hello Kitty pins. \"smiley-laughing\"<\/p>\n

Seriously though, this is a staggering valuation growth rate as the company was just valued at over $200M late last year.<\/p>\n

The timing for this transaction couldn’t be better as Facebook is still in the hype phase – investors are scrambling to be part of it and the demand for new social offerings seems to be at an all-time high. Moreover the potential large-scale defection of Facebook advertisers that some are predicting<\/a> as a result of the public news of GM getting poor ad results<\/a> hasn’t happened – at least yet.<\/p>\n

Of course the pin-board based social network is new, growing quickly at over 20M users and is looking for a business model. The good news is a number of companies have said the visual social network drives more traffic to their sites than even mighty Facebook.<\/p>\n

The challenge of course is how to turn those eyeballs into cash.<\/p>\n

That will be the challenge – but if the site is already connecting buyers and sellers, there should be a way to take a piece of the transactions being generated.<\/p>\n

At least that is what the investors paying the ever-escalating price the company’s shares are going for are hoping.<\/p>\n

More: Softpedia<\/a>, Reuters<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that was fast – Pinterest just raised $100M at a valuation of $1.5B in a round of funding led by Japanese e-commerce site Rakuten Inc. Pinterest’s existing venture-capital investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners also participated according to a press release. Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Rakuten said: “While some<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,161,162,210,206,118],"tags":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9840"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9840"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19319,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9840\/revisions\/19319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}