Tenor Founded

2014

Animated Tenor wordmark. Founded 2014 as Riffsy, Tenor built the keyboard search engine that powered iOS, Twitter and Facebook GIF pickers before Google acquired it in 2018. Place: Palo Alto and San Francisco; originally branded Riffsy Figures: David McIntosh, CEO · Erick Hachenburg, CTO · Frank Nawabi, co-founder David McIntosh and Erick Hachenburg launch Riffsy in 2014 as a GIF-keyboard app rather than a search-engine destination. The bet: nobody is going to navigate to a website to find a reaction GIF; they want the GIF inside the keyboard, one tap from any text field. The app rebrands to Tenor in 2016 and ships as the default GIF picker in Android's Gboard the same year. While Giphy (see [[giphy-founded-2013]]) optimizes the embed-in-a-browser model, Tenor optimizes the embed-in-the-keyboard model. The two products converge on similar back-end indexes but reach users through different surfaces. By 2017 Tenor claims 12 billion GIF searches per month.