Pin it for later? Pinterest acquires Instapaper

Pinterest has acquired Instapaper, both companies have confirmed. 

Pinterest did not disclose the terms of the acquisition but the company said Instapaper will continue as a standalone app. Instapaper's team, including CEO Brian Donohue, will join Pinterest where they will work on both Instapaper and Pinterest products.

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"Instapaper will work with us to continue building indexing and recommendations technologies, and we look forward to building great products together," Pinterest's lead project manager Steve Davis said in a statement. 

Pinterest's acquisition marks the second time Instapaper has changed hands. Startup studio Betaworks bought a majority stake in the company in 2013 after founder Marco Arment said the app had "grown far beyond what one person can do."

At first glance, Instapaper, an app that allows users to save articles to read later, may seem like an odd target for the visual bookmarking site. But it appears Pinterest is particularly interested in using the Instapaper team to help build out its search and discovery features. 

The site has recently doubled down on its shift toward e-commerce, and visual search and better discovery tools have been key to those efforts. The company previewed a new search feature earlier this summer that allows users to search and buy products by taking a photo with their smartphone.

The acquisition also raises the question of whether Instapaper could eventually be integrated into Pinterest, as many users already use the site to save articles, recipes, and other content. But it appears the plans is to keep the two separate — at least for now. A spokesperson for Pinterest tells Mashable there are no current plans to integrate the two products.