The online bulletin-board-style social network Pinterest Inc announced on Monday it had raised US$367 million in new capital, pushing its valuation to US$11 billion.
The new funds will help fuel global expansion plans for the fast-growing social network, which calls itself a “visual bookmarking tool.”
A Pinterest statement said US$367 million in primary financing was raised at a valuation of US$11 billion, and that it may raise as much as an additional US$211 million.
“Participants include new and previous investors,” it said.
“Pinterest will use the additional capital for corporate purposes, including to fuel international expansion,” it said.
“In 2014, international users grew more than 135 percent. Today, they are more than 40 percent of all users, up from just 28 percent in 2013,” it said.
The new investment was first disclosed in a regulatory filing, with the investors on the deal listed as the venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners.
The latest round more than doubles the valuation for Pinterest, which last year confirmed a US$200 million investment at a US$5 billion valuation.
The deal pushes Pinterest into an elite club of startups with a value of US$10 billion or more, led by car-sharing giant Uber Technologies Inc at about US$41 billion.
Because it is privately held, Pinterest discloses only limited amounts of metrics. The research firm eMarketer estimates it has some 47 million US users, and some estimates indicate the global number is about 75 million users.
Pinterest has become one of the Internet’s hottest new Web sites, particularly among women, by giving people virtual bulletin boards that they can decorate with pictures showcasing interests in anything from food to sports, to fashion or travel.
Pinterest last year launched a tool to help people quickly sift through the roughly 30 billion “pins” on the service’s online bulletin boards to find what they like.
It just recently began selling advertising in the form of “promoted pins.”
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