Pinterest has scooped up the team behind Highlight, a social app for meeting nearby strangers that made some headlines during Austin’s South by Southwest festival a few years ago.
The online bulletin board for fashion, food, and home decor images announced on Thursday that most of the team from Match Camp, maker of Highlight, is joining its ranks to work on its mobile app and related products. In total, 10 of Math Camp’s employees are headed to Pinterest, including co-founders Paul Davison and Ben Garrett. They will join various engineering, design, and growth teams based on their skills.
“The team behind Math Camp are experts in building innovative mobile products to connect people with similar tastes and help them discover day-to-day images and video across platforms,” lead Pinterest product manager Steve Davis said in a statement. “We welcome their years of experience across engineering, product and design as we build the world’s catalog of ideas.”
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Founded in 2010, Pinterest branched beyond its roots by releasing a mobile app, expanding its image search technology, and focused on making money through advertising and e-commerce. It now has more than 100 million monthly active users.
Math Camp first made a small splash in 2012 when it released Highlight, a mobile app to connect nearby users with similar interests. The app was released just in time for South by Southwest, an annual tech festival in Austin, where in 2007, Twitter first rose to popularity among attendees. However, many users quickly abandoned Highlight when they discovered it quickly drained their smartphone’s battery, something Math Camp’s team eventually fixed, though a little too late.
In March, Math Camp released its second act, an iOS app called Shorts. It lets users peek into the lives of their friends and loved ones by seeing the photos on their smartphone camera roll. By then, Math Camp had abandoned Highlight, shifted to Shorts, and morphed into an app making studio that churns out multiple apps and focuses on those that gain traction.
Now that it’s joining Pinterest, Math Camp will shutter its apps in the coming weeks, a Pinterest spokeswoman told Coins2Day.