Pinterest Acquires Team That Built Fleksy Inc.
June 15 2016 - 4:50PM
Dow Jones News
Pinterest Inc. on Wednesday said it acquired the team that built
Fleksy Inc., maker of a keyboard app that uses predictive
technology to improve typing on touch screens.
The image-discovery site said Fleksy's technology isn't part of
the deal, and the app will continue to run for now. Instead,
Pinterest said about half of Fleksy's 10-person staff will join the
company, including founder and CEO Kosta Eleftheriou.
Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.
San Francisco-based Fleksy raised about $6 million from
investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and
Highland Capital, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.
Founded in 2011, Fleksy started off as an iPhone and iPad app
for the blind community to help them type on devices. It later
expanded to serve a broader audience for both Apple iOS and Google
Android devices, helping users to improve the speed of typing and
enabling them to customize their keyboard.
Pinterest said some of the app's accessibility components that
aid the blind and visually impaired with be open sourced. Fleksy
has been downloaded on more than 12 million devices, Pinterest
said.
The predictive technology powering smart keyboard space has been
getting crowded with options such as SwiftKey and Swype vying to
become the consumer's first choice.
Competition heated up when Microsoft Corp. agreed to buy the
company behind SwiftKey for a reported $250 million in February, as
ambitions in artificial intelligence have grown among the tech
giants.
For Pinterest's part, the company hopes the Fleksy team's
mobile-engineering prowess can help it build out a visual search
engine it dubs a "catalog of ideas." Mr. Eleftheriou will be
joining the product-engineering team.
"Pinterest is intensely focused on refining the mobile
experiences that make it possible to flow effortlessly through our
catalog of ideas on any device, any place in the world," said Scott
Goodson, Pinterest's head of core experience. "The Fleksy team is
made up of truly noteworthy engineers and world experts in their
areas. These technical artists have a history of developing
architecturally innovative, highly optimized software."
Pinterest has made several acquisitions in recent years to
acquire talent. Last month, Pinterest acquired half of the staff at
URX, a San Francisco mobile advertising service.
Write to Yoree Koh at yoree.koh@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 15, 2016 16:35 ET (20:35 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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