Giphy Founded

FEB 15 2013 · 12:00

Deal With It sunglasses, an Originals GIF. The reaction-image vocabulary that Giphy launched in February 2013 to organize and search. Place: New York City Figures: Alex Chung and Jace Cooke, co-founders Alex Chung and Jace Cooke launch Giphy in February 2013 as a search engine for GIFs. The site has roughly 10,000 indexed GIFs at launch; by year's end it has millions. The model is simple: index the entire animated-image corpus of the web, let people search by mood or topic or phrase, embed the GIFs in messages and tweets and slack channels via copy-paste or API. Within four years Giphy raises $150 million in venture funding at a $600 million valuation. The Tenor competitor (acquired by Google in 2018) provides the GIF-keyboard layer for Android. Giphy provides the same for iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, and most major messaging platforms. The animated image has, for the first time in its history, formal commercial infrastructure.