Pinterest acquires Kosei

Facebook knows who you were. Google knows what you want now. Now, Pinterest yearns to know what you want next, which is exactly why it acquired recommendation engine startup Kosei. For an undisclosed figure, Pinterest gets Kosei tech that understands 400 Million relationships between 30 Million products, and the majority of its 10-person team including its co-founders.

Kosei team will spend their first 90 days figuring out where to apply them across black ops spam deterrence, product discovery and recommendations, visual object recognition, ad click prediction for monetization, growth analytics, and building a machine learning system on spark for Pinterest data team. It can supercharge Pinterest existing graph to help brands reach people at the right moments and improve content for pinners.

Kosei products allowed customers to make better product recommendations on their sites, apps, and in ads. By looking at what user had browsed or purchased previously, Kosei machine-learning engine could compare that against commerce data sets, and predict what someone was most likely to want to buy next.

From improving the accuracy of its ad targeting to recommending better pins to appear on user’s home pages, machine learning is crucial to Pinterest future. While companies like Google get easy cues like search queries to determine what people want to see, Pinterest has to bet based on what it knows about people from their past behaviour. However, with the right machine learning algorithms, user next favorite recipe, watch, or, quote could be waiting on the Pinterest home page.