Who Owns Pinterest?

Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp launched Pinterest in March 2010 out of a Palo Alto startup called Cold Brew Labs. The product let users collect images from around the web onto themed boards, a simple idea that spread quickly through wedding planning, home decor, and recipe communities. Growth was largely organic and unusually female-skewed for a Silicon Valley product.

The company raised venture rounds through the early 2010s at valuations that passed $10 billion by 2015. Revenue did not begin in earnest until promoted pins launched in 2014, and the advertising business scaled slowly as Pinterest struggled to explain its model to marketers accustomed to search and social budgets.

Pinterest went public in April 2019 at a valuation of about $10 billion, below its final private round. The pandemic delivered a surge: users passed 400 million and revenue nearly doubled in 2020 as locked-down consumers planned projects and shopped online. Growth reversed sharply in 2021 when reopening pulled users away, and the company cycled through a difficult year of falling users and a declining stock price.

Bill Ready's arrival in June 2022 reset the strategy around shopping intent and performance advertising. The company rebuilt its ad stack around lower-funnel formats, deepened third-party demand through a partnership first with Amazon and later Google, and invested heavily in AI-driven visual search and personalized feeds.

The turnaround has produced thirteen consecutive quarters of record user counts. Monthly active users hit 661 million in Q3 2026, up 10 percent year over year, and revenue reached $4.22 billion for full-year 2025, up 16 percent. More than 80 billion searches now run on the platform each month.