Pinterest Acquires The Hunt and Pext. Both Will Shut Down.

Pinterest hired a bunch of new staffers in the form of two separate acquisitions announced Tuesday.

The first: Pinterest bought The Hunt, a shopping app that lets users post a picture of a product they’d like to buy but can’t find online. Other users then help find that product and share links for where to buy it. Founder and CEO Tim Weingarten and some of the company’s product people are joining Pinterest, but the website will be shut down “by early next year,” a Pinterest spokesperson added. It has raised more than $15 million in funding from VC firms like Khosla Ventures.

The second: Pinterest acquired Pext, an app that helps find photos to match your text messages and easily turns them into memes. Pext is removing its app from the App Store and Google Play store as part of the acquisition, and Harsh Goel, one of the app’s two co-founders, will join Pinterest.

Pinterest is not acquiring any of either company’s technology.

That’s another way of saying that Pext and The Hunt were acquired for the people who built them, not the companies themselves — an “acqhire,” as the vernacular goes. In a statement, Pinterest engineering boss Michael Lopp said that “image indexing” — the ability to recall images from text-based queries — was one of the key reasons for the hires. This, of course, is what Pinterest is trying to perfect.

The Hunt, Pext

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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