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This article was published on January 3, 2013

Pinterest acquires recipe sharer Punchfork to beef up foodie appeal, will shutter site


Pinterest acquires recipe sharer Punchfork to beef up foodie appeal, will shutter site

Pinterest has announced it has acquired the home cooking startup Punchfork. As a result of this deal, Punchfork will soon be shuttered, along with its API and mobile apps.

In a statement to the Punchfork community, CEO Jeff Miller said that since its launch in January 2011, the company’s mission has been to help home cooks discover new, high-quality recipes and share them with family and friends. The drive to have the web and mobile platforms be a tool to inspire people’s lives offline and wherever meals are shared have kept it going.

Punchfork’s integration with Pinterest will certainly add to the social network’s foodie appeal. After all, Pinterest is already the place where millions of users have come to share interesting things they share online. The site even has a category for Food & Drink.

Pinterest will be shuttering the site, although no specific timeframe has been given. Miller’s announcement says that it won’t be done quickly:

Initially, support for Punchfork will continue, but we will soon be retiring the Punchfork site, API and mobile apps. 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.

With this deal, Pinterest looks to have made its very first acquisition. The company has raised over $138 million in funding from the likes of Bessemer Venture Partners, Max Levchin, Ron Conway, Andreessen Horowitz, and others. The exact deals of the acquisition haven’t been released yet.

Photo credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

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