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Los Angeles-based incu­ba­tor and tech­nol­ogy stu­dio Sci­ence, has acquired Pin­puff, an India-based startup which mea­sures the pop­u­lar­ity of Pin­ter­est users. The devel­op­ment was first reported by TechCrunch.

While the finan­cial details of the acqui­si­tion were not dis­closed, Sci­ence stated that Pin­puff will work with the studio’s in-house agency, Hel­loSo­ci­ety, to help for­mu­late a dis­tri­b­u­tion strat­egy for the company’s upcom­ing prod­uct launches. It would also relo­cate Gau­rav Sharma, founder and CEO of Pin­puff to its Los Ange­les Headquarters.

Mike Jones, CEO of Sci­ence said that this acqui­si­tion was in line with Science’s strat­egy to build ser­vices and tools that assist influ­encers in build­ing their audi­ences, and even­tu­ally turn them as actual busi­nesses. He noted that Pin­ter­est has been the sec­ond high­est refer­ral net­work for sales within Sci­ence com­pa­nies. It plans to use Pinpuff’s tech­nol­ogy and exper­tise to cal­cu­late true stan­dard of reach across social net­works. He said - ”Now that Pin­ter­est is nearly as ubiq­ui­tous as Face­book and Twit­ter, and other plat­forms like The Fancy and Svp­ply are ris­ing through the ranks, we can tap into the tech­nol­ogy that Pin­puff has built to cre­ate a true gauge of reach – one that goes beyond clicks, page views, and sta­tic traf­fic num­bers, one that mea­sures the power of influence”.

Launched in Feb­ru­ary 2012, Pin­puff allows users to cal­cu­late their ‘Pin­flu­ence’, which is essen­tially a mea­sure of the influ­ence, pop­u­lar­ity, and reach of Pin­ter­est users. In addi­tion, it also allows users to view the total traf­fic gen­er­ated by their pins and mon­e­tary value of each pin. It works quite sim­i­lar to how the San Fran­cisco based Klout or the London-based PeerIndex work except for the fact that the site focusses only on Pin­ter­est. Inter­est­ingly, Pin­puff also has a perks pro­gram called ‘Pin­Perks‘ which offers exclu­sive gifts, invites, sub­scrip­tions or good­ies to users based on their influ­ence on Pin­ter­est, which is quite sim­i­lar to Klout’s perks pro­gram.

In March 2012, Pin­puff had claimed to have a total user base of 100,000 within just two weeks of its incep­tion, adding 10,000 users on a daily basis. It had also appar­ently signed deals with around 100 brands who intend to track influ­ence on Pin­ter­est, as indi­cated by the TechCrunch report.

On the other side, Sci­ence has launched a series of e-commerce busi­nesses like Dol­lar Shave Club, Wit­tle­bee, Dog­Va­cay, Eventup and more recently Uncovet. It is backed by a group of investors like Rus­tic Canyon, White Star Cap­i­tal, The Social+Capital Part­ner­ship, Tomor­row Ven­tures, Siemer Ven­tures, Philippe Camus, Jean-Marie Messier, Jonathan Miller and Den­nis Phelps.

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