What service did Pinterest acquire in 2016 and later sell?

Pinterest acquired Instapaper in 2016 and later sold the service back to an independent company.

On August 23, 2016, Pinterest announced that it was acquiring the team behind Instapaper, the read-later service that lets people save articles and read them later. Instapaper continued operating as a separate app after the acquisition. Pinterest’s interest was closely connected to bookmarking: both products revolved around collecting, organizing, and returning to useful content discovered online.

Instapaper had an earlier ownership history. Developer Marco Arment sold a majority stake in the service to Betaworks in 2013. Pinterest acquired it from Betaworks three years later, bringing the Instapaper team into Pinterest while retaining the app’s separate identity.

In July 2018, Pinterest announced that ownership would transfer to Instant Paper, Inc., a new company run by people who had been working on Instapaper. This is why the answer is sometimes confused with Betaworks: Betaworks owned Instapaper before Pinterest, while Pinterest was the company that acquired it in 2016 and later sold it. The transaction was an example of Pinterest using an acquisition to strengthen its understanding of saved content and user intent.