By Brianna Bailey
Copyright © 2013, The Oklahoma Publishing Company
Oklahoma City-based startup Tailwind, which offers analytics and marketing tools for the social networking site Pinterest, has acquired its one-time rival PinReach, a Pinterest reporting tool with more than 30,000 users.
The acquisition will allow Tailwind to expand its services and migrate PinReach’s users over to the Tailwind platform, said Danny Maloney, CEO and co-founder of Tailwind.
“It was great timing that it was available and it was another company directly in our user space,” Maloney said.
PinReach was one of the first Pinterest analytics services and was acquired by the New York-based marketing and technology firm Nervewire Inc. in 2012. However, Nervewire has since decided to return to a focus more on its core business — digital marketing and public relations.
“When Nervewire acquired PinReach last year, our intent was to learn as much as we could about Pinterest as quickly as possible, so that we could better serve our clients and prospects,” said Natalie Dold, Nervewire’s vice president client partner, in a statement.
“We achieved that objective and are happy to see PinReach join the Tailwind family.”
The terms of the sale to Tailwind were not disclosed.
PinReach launched in 2012, around the same time as Tailwind. Both companies were among some of the first tools for companies that use Pinterest to market their products to measure their reach.
Tailwind’s acquisition of PinReach helps secure the company’s position as a leader for Pinterest analytics, Maloney said.
Tailwind offers Pinterest analytics and a marketing suite that features tools that help companies extract maximum value from Pinterest. The company is also in the process of developing additional cloud-based software services that will be launched later in 2013 and 2014.
The company has nine full-time and four part-time employees mostly split between New York and Oklahoma City. It was founded by Maloney, a former Google and AOL executive based in Oklahoma City, and Alex Topiler, a New York-based entrepreneur who formerly worked for Bank of America. Until September, Tailwind was called PinLeague.
About 3,000 brands and agencies use Tailwind to identify things like brand following on Pinterest and repins. Riding the tide of Pinterest’s growing popularity, Tailwind plans to roughly double the size of its staff over the next six to eight months, Maloney said.
“PinReach was known for measuring influence of individuals on Pinterest — not something we had focused on in the past because we were more focused on performance metrics” Maloney said. “Certainly the acquisition will help extend our position as the leader of the market by extending their user base into our products and help us have that many more customers.”
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