As part of the deal, half of Fleksy’s 10-person team just became part of Pinterest’s mobile and mobile platform engineering departments and will incorporate their knowledge of visual search into Pinterest’s platform.
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Pinterest has had a very specific acquisition strategy this year so far: it has purchased three companies, all of which have been acqui-hired.
According to VentureBeat, Pinterest did not acquire the app itself and, while chief operating officer Ashley Eleftheriou and founder and CEO Kostas Eleftheriou said in their blog post that Fleksy will remain available in app stores, VentureBeat reported that the app will remain operational “for the foreseeable future”, but updates will be “minimal”.
Image discovery website Pinterest Inc. announced on June 15 that it has acquired the company behind the renowned smart keyboard app dubbed Fleksy.
The Fleksy keyboard is a hugely popular third-party keyboard on Android; and it has a dedicated fan base.
Fleksy had been launched as an iOS app in the beginning.
For the uninitiated, Fleksy’s keyboard app makes use of a predictive technology created to enhance typing on touch screens.
“Pinterest is intensely focused on refining the mobile experiences that make it possible to flow effortlessly through our catalog of ideas – on any device, any place in the world”, Scott Goodson, Head of Core Experience at Pinterest, said in a statement provided to VatorNews. “These technical artists have a history of developing architecturally innovative, highly optimized software”. Half of the Fleksy team will be joining Pinterest, with the other half pursuing “opportunities elsewhere”.
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Once the acquisition is completed, the fleksy app will be made open source to give more flexibility to the developers in order to get what people really think and want from the app.
