Main Highlights:
- The company will buy Vochi’s intellectual property and its 40-person team, including its founders, to improve Pinterest’s video creation tools and enable its creators to make more dynamic videos.
- Pinterest has provided a new mechanism for viewers to watch these videos in the form of a TikTok-like “Watch” button, incentivizing participation through a $20 million creator reward program.
- Pinterest claims that acquiring Vochi will give even more high-quality video to its users.
With today’s announcement that it has bought the video creation and editing software Vochi for an undisclosed fee, Pinterest continues to invest in creator tools and video. The firm will acquire Vochi’s intellectual property and its 40-person team, including its founders, to enhance Pinterest’s video creation tools and enable its creators to create more dynamic videos.
What Pinterest has to offer?
Pinterest has been working for the last year or so to pivot away from being solely an image pinboard — a repository for static images intended to inspire purchases and ideas. Rather than that, Pinterest now views itself as a platform for producers who can share their thoughts via video — whether they’re recipes, do-it-yourself craft projects, home décor ideas, beauty tips, or fashion ideas.
Pinterest released Ideas Pins this spring to capitalize on this activity. Ideas Pins is a video-first feature that enables creators to share their tales with editing tools such as voiceovers, music, transitions, and other interactive effects. Recently, Pinterest introduced a new way for viewers to watch these films in the form of a TikTok-like “Watch” button, encouraging involvement through a $20 million creator incentive program.
Pinterest also launched its original video content, Creator Originals, and has been assisting creators in monetizing their films through various methods, including labeling goods for sale, participating in affiliate shopping programs, and forming brand collaborations. Pinterest claims that Vochi will provide its consumers with even more high-quality video.
Ilya Lesun, Anna Bulgakova, Vasily Kasnitsky, and Sergei Malyutin founded the Belarus-based video editing app in 2019. It was incubated by Bulba Ventures’ Andrei Avsievich and Yury Melnichek. The software uses a unique computer vision-based video segmentation technology to apply numerous effects to specific moving elements in video or static photographs.
Its effect array includes a “motion” effect that emphasizes movement, a “glitch” effect, a “clones” effect, those that alter the light and shadows, and those that add animated objects to videos, such as a burst of butterflies or neon forms.
In an interview, Vochi CEO Ilya Lesun revealed that two trained [convolutional neural networks] execute semi-supervised Video Object Segmentation and Instance Segmentation to achieve this outcome. Additionally, their team created a proprietary rendering engine for video effects, enabling instant 4K applications on mobile devices. And, according to him, it functions flawlessly without sacrificing quality.
Additionally, the program has filters for photographs and video and other standard editing tools. The app had over 500,000 monthly active users early this year, with approximately 20,000 subscribing to a paid membership. Pinterest stated that it was interested in Vochi because its technology coincided with Pinterest’s investment in video as a venue for creators to express themselves. It valued the speed with which the effects could be applied to video.
Bin Liu, Pinterest’s head of Creators Engineering, stated that the company’s mission is to create a space where Pinners may journey from inspiration to realization. Adding more creator tools will help them accomplish this goal. They’re delighted to collaborate with Vochi’s skilled team to deliver new video creation tools and high-quality content to our global community of over 400 million Pinners.
Pinterest’s collaboration with Vochi
The Vochi team will remain in Europe, and the Vochi app will remain available as a standalone experience rather than being withdrawn from app stores. (As of this morning, the company’s vochi.app website, which is referenced on their App Store listing, was not operational. It appears as though they relocated to a new website, vochi.com, but neglected to update the app’s listing page with the correct information).
Pinterest declined to elaborate on how it intends to integrate Vochi’s technology directly into the platform in the future. Still, it’s a reasonable assumption that Pinterest would ultimately offer its video creation and editing experience within its flagship app.
Before joining Pinterest, Vochi had earned $4.2 million in fundraising and was on the verge of completing a Series A round. TA Ventures, Angelsdeck, A.Partners, Startup Wise Guys, Kolos VC, and angel investors from firms such as Belarus-based Verv and Estonian unicorn Bolt participated in its most recent round.
