Pinterest announced that it has acquired Jelly, the question and answer service produced by Twitter cofounder Biz Stone. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Stone will become a “special advisor” to Pinterest chief product officer Evan Sharp. The firm also siad Jelly’s chief technology officer Ben Finkel will move over to the growth product team.
The addition of Jelly’s team could benefit Pinterest through its expertise in image recognition and building networks across products and machine learning. In addition, the use of artificial intelligence could better allow Pinterest to surface more contextual pins and ads.
Details about what’s going to happen to Jelly’s app remains unknown. In a Medium post, Stone admitted that both teams are “working out details” such as whether Jelly remains separate or will be integrated.
“Nevertheless, we are incredibly enthusiastic and certain, that this is the best decision for the future of human powered search and discovery,” he wrote.
Jelly raised an undisclosed amount of funding from investors including his Twitter cofounders Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams, Spark Capital, SV Angel, Greylock Partners, former Vice President Al Gore, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and others.
