Giphy raises $55M to fill your world with GIFs

The company will use the funding to start monetizing through partnerships with brands and publishers

How did we ever live in a world without GIFs? How did we watch a TV show and not, at some point, think to ourselves, "Oh, someone is definitely making a GIF of that!"? I remember those times, and I don't ever want to go back there. What a terrible world that was to live in!

Any GIF you find probably originated with Giphy, a service that acts like a hub for the short animated images, allowing users to both search for, and to create, them. That has turned out to be a pretty useful service, as evidenced by the amount of venture capital it has now raised.

Giphy raised $55 million in funding, the company announced on Monday. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from General Catalyst Partners, RRE, Betaworks, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, CAA and other existing investors.

With this funding, the company has now raised nearly $80 million, and is valued at $300 million. 

Founded in 2013, Giphy acts like search engine for GIFS, while also allowing users to create their own. Giphy is currently integrated with platforms that include Slack, and Facebook Messenger as one of the first apps to be launched on its developer platform last year, allowing users to more easily share the GIFs they find and create.

That's only part of the service, though. The other, more important, aspect of it are its partnerships with services, publishers and brands. That's where the company's money is going to come from, eventually.

The company has partnered with the Hollywood studios, TV networks, music labels, production companies and sports leagues, including FOX, the NBA, Nike, and Paramount Pics. Some of its featured partners include Calvin Klein, Disney, General Electric, Katy Perry, and Subway, along with properties like The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones and Girls.

All those partnerships have been paying off, not only in funding, but in growth. The company revealed that is has grown over 500 percent in just the last year.

That has not yet turned into revenue, though CEO Alex Chung did hint to Techcrunch about some of the different ways it could monetize. That includes something where a user would search for a GIF and would see advertisements, or sponsored content, based on what had submitted. Pretty much what Google does right now. 

The most likely source of revenue will probably come from those brands it has partnered with, who can use the service to promote their latest releases. For example there is GIPHY CAM, the GIF camera app for iOS that it introduced last year as a " way to record your life as a series of GIFs." The app contains filters, and the company has already partnered with brands to create limited edition, special filters based on movies and TV shows like Star Wars, Zoolander and X-Files.

According to Chung, Giphy will use the funding to start to monetize in the coming year, though there's no specific timetable for when that will happen.

Part of what makes Giphy stand out is that, while isn't the only GIF-centered app out there, it's one of the few that has raised money.

There are GIF keyboards Giffage and PopKey, and GIFSoup, which lets users create animated GIFs from Youtube videos. Only GIF keyboard maker Riffsy, has taken significant funding, having raised a $10 million Series A, in August of last year, bringing its total funding to over $13 million. 

VatorNews reached out to Giphy for further comment. We will update this story if we learn more.

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