Shutterfly

Shutterfly, Inc. (commonly "Shutterfly") is a US personalized-products company founded in 1999 and headquartered in Redwood City, California. It was publicly traded on NASDAQ (SFLY) until affiliates of Apollo Global Management (NYSE: APO) took it private in a roughly $2.7 billion deal completed September 25, 2019; Apollo funds remain the majority owner. It is privately held and its shares are no longer listed. Crunchbase lists headcount at 10,000+ and Forbes classifies it as a large employer; no reliable current revenue figure is publicly disclosed.

Shutterfly operates an e-commerce and manufacturing platform for personalized products, organized into three divisions: Consumer (flagship Shutterfly, plus Snapfish and Spoonflower), Lifetouch (school and preschool–graduation photography, including "Picture Day"), and Shutterfly Business Solutions (marketing/communications production). Its consumer catalog spans photo books, prints, cards, calendars, wall art, home décor, wedding invitations, and custom gifts, printed and fulfilled at company plants (e.g., Fort Mill, South Carolina; Arizona; Texas). This is a real operating company, not a patent-assertion entity.

Litigation posture: Shutterfly appears in the tracked data as a defendant in one case and a plaintiff in zero — the profile of an operating company targeted by a patent holder rather than an active plaintiff. The sole tracked suit, Plano Encryption Technologies, LLC v. Shutterfly, was filed in the Eastern District of Texas (2:16-cv-01053, Judge Rodney Gilstrap) on September 28, 2016, and closed August 25, 2017.

Case context: Plano Encryption asserted two patents (U.S. 5,991,399 and 5,974,550), originally issued to Intel and generally directed to digital-content protection and remote security protocols in online/mobile transactions. Plano Encryption Technologies is characterized by RPX and Unified Patents as a non-practicing entity — a Koba Holdings subsidiary with a single officer — that ran a campaign against banks, retailers, and consumer-app operators; the patents were later transferred to Honeyman Cipher Solutions. No merits findings are reported here.