Pinterest announced that it has acquired the team behind mobile publishing startup Hike Labs. This includes founder and CEO Jason Shellen and Head of Engineering Mike Demers.
A Pinterest spokesperson told WebProNews the two “bring their years of experience in developing content creation and community tools to the Pinterest product and engineering teams.”
“Over the years Jason has played major roles in the development of iconic communications and publishing platforms as a founding member of both the Blogger and Google Reader teams,” they said. “He also founded Thing Labs, which was acquired by AOL in 2010, at which point Jason led the relaunch and rebrand of AIM.”
“Mike’s accomplishments include founding 9Astronauts, an application development platform, and serving as CTO of YouSaidIt, where he developed a visual blogging site and an app-building service for people to build their own communities around interests,” they added.
“Jason and Mike’s experiences in building communications, content and community tools will help us tackle significant areas in discovery,” said Pinterest Head of Product Jack Chou in a statement.
“As longtime fans and users of Pinterest, we’re excited to join a world class team with the goal of helping people around the world discover, save and do creative ideas,” added Shellen.
Shellen and Demers write on the Hike Labs site:
When we founded Hike Labs in June 2014, we wrote:
“A hike is a wonderful thing. We revisit the same trails but always discover something new. At Hike Labs we’re discovering the wonder in our well-worn paths and bringing out the best of our favorite ideas.”
We then spent the next several months building out a new mobile-first blogging app called Drafty. We kept the team small and iterated on the idea with a handful of beta testers. However, we met a team along the way who shared our passion for building important products with a focus on discovery and design.
Today we’re proud to announce that our journey as Hike Labs is over but our path led us to join the team at Pinterest! We want to thank our family, friends, advisors, beta testers, supporters, investors and everyone else who helped along the way. We hope you’ll all join us for the next journey too.
Happy hiking,
The Hike Labs Team
Hike Labs would be Pinterest’s seventh acquisition, following Punchfork, Livestar, Hackermeter, Visual Graph, Icebergs and Kosei. Earlier this week, the company announced some things the Icebergs team has been working on, including a new “Pin It” flow. More on that here.
Images via Hike Labs
