

Tote users were, however, amassing large collections of favorite items and sharing them with other users. At the time, mobile payment technology was not sophisticated enough to enable easy on-the-go transactions, inhibiting users from making many purchases via the app. Tote struggled as a business, significantly due to difficulties with mobile payments. The idea for Pinterest emerged from an earlier app created by Ben Silberman and Paul Sciarra called Tote which served as a virtual replacement for paper catalogs.

It is operated by Pinterest, Inc., based in San Francisco. The site was created by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, and had 450 million global monthly active users as of December 2022.

Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards.
