Pinterest said Wednesday that it purchased mobile keyboard company Fleksy as part of an effort to improve how the social bookmarking site runs on mobile devices.
The San Francisco tech firm isn t acquiring the technology behind Fleksy, but is bringing on about half of Fleksy s 10-person team. The new hires include Fleksy founder and CEO Kosta Eleftheriou, who is joining Pinterest s product engineering team.
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, said Scott Goodson, Pinterest s Head of Core Experience in a statement. The Fleksy team is made up of truly noteworthy engineers and world experts in their areas. These technical artists have a history of developing architecturally innovative, highly optimized software.
Pinterest declined to disclose the amount of the deal.
Started in 2011, Fleksy s mobile keyboard was initially designed for the blind and visually impaired. The keyboard will still remain in the app store and Fleksy plans to open source some of the technology meant to help those group of people.
Available for Apple and Android devices, Fleksy markets itself as the fastest keyboard in the world. In 2014, Brazilian teenager Marcel Fernandes Filho broke the Guinness Book of World Records for fastest text message typing using Fleksy. The keyboard senses the area you type instead of the letter, which allows the app to auto-correct misspelled words quickly, according to the company s site.
We re excited to join the world-class team at Pinterest where we ll continue working on intuitive content discovery experiences on mobile. We ll be bringing our expertise on both iOS and Android to join Pinterest in developing the most robust, beautiful and engaging ways to help people discover ideas, Eleftheriou said in a statement.
Fleksy isn t the only company that Pinterest has acquired recently to bring in more talent to the tech firm.
In May, the tech firm bought San Francisco-based mobile advertising company URX, adding about 15 employees from that company.
Since 2012, Fleksy raised about $5.9 million in funding, according to CrunchBase. Pinterest is valued at $11 billion.
Photo Credit: Pinterest s logo. Lionel Bonaventure, AFP/Getty Images.
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