Pinterest announced today that it has acquired VisualGraph, an image recognition and visual search technology startup.

“VisualGraph’s two employees — founder Kevin Jing and colleague David Liu — will be joining the Pinterest engineering team today,” a spokesperson for Pinterest tells WebProNews. “Kevin started working at Google in 2004 and helped build some of Google’s first machine vision applications. David was working on his master’s degree in computer science at Stanford when he started at Visual Graph. He also interned at several companies, including Google, Facebook and Palantir.”

“Pinterest is a visual tool that helps people plan their futures,” the spokesperson added. “The acquisition of VisualGraph will help us build technology to better understand what people are Pinning. By doing so, we hope to make it easier for people to find the things they love. Kevin has been working on large-scale machine vision problems for almost a decade and will be leading our new visual discovery team. We’re very excited to have Kevin and David join Pinterest.”

The two say in an announcement on the VisualGraph site, “On Pinterest, millions of people are curating and sharing billions of Pins everyday. And these Pins are more than just images — they link to contents that can inspire and enrich people’s lives. We are excited for the opportunity to combine machine vision with human vision and curation, and to build a visual discovery experience that is both aesthetically appealing and immensely useful for people everywhere.”

The site talks a little about what VisualGraph does, which is connecting images as “special nodes” in a graph to “allow for inspiration, exploration and discovery at scale.” They combine machine vision tools with large-scale distributed search and machine learning infrastuctures.

It sounds like Pinterest could be getting better at search and image discovery. That’s a good thing since it’s apparently more popular than Twitter in the U.S.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Image: VisualGraph