Start-up Pinterest Receives Major Round of Funding

Last week Pinterest, a site that allows people to share things on the web, raised $27 million in a round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. As part of the financing deal, general partner Jeff Jordan will be joining Pinterest’s Board of Directors. According to outside sources, the young startup has been valued at up to $200 million and has less than ten employees. The site is still in beta and is invite-only.

Pinterest is a pinboard social network that allows users to collect, organize and share interesting things found on the web. Users can take an image from any website and add it to one of their ‘pinboards.’ Each image has a link to the original source, allowing for the discovery of new things of interest.

Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann said that the company is setting out to “connect people all over the world through common interest.”

Jordan said Horowitz is excited about Pinterest for three main reasons: first, the site is showing very strong growth
metrics, despite the fact that it’s still in a semi-private beta. Second, the service has very strong user engagement — Jordan claims registered users often wind up using it “fairly voraciously”. Finally, the site has a clear path to revenues.

While Pinterest may be in the limelight, there are competitors such as FFFFound, Weheartit and Dropular among others. How these sites compete with each other through innovation will be interesting to watch. However, one thing is certaain– sharing favorite images online has struck a nerve with people.

The idea is not only proving popular, but is also interesting for venture capital and angel investors because
it has different revenue opportunities. A lot of the boards made by users have potential commercial intent (i.e. wedding or birthday lists) and there are certainly business models which could be built around them.

Pinterest was also named among the 50 Best Websites of 2011 by Time Magazine.