Facebook on Friday announced it has acquired Giphy, a company with a massive GIF library for users to add to their text messages and social media accounts. The deal is worth $400 million, according to Axios, the first company to report the news.
“A lot of people in our community already know and love Giphy. In fact, 50% of GIPHY’s traffic comes from the Facebook family of apps, half of that from Instagram alone,” Facebook said in its blog post announcing the deal. “By bringing Instagram and Giphy together, we can make it easier for people to find the perfect GIFs and stickers in Stories and Direct. Both our services are big supporters of the creator and artist community, and that will continue. Together, we can make it easier for anyone to create and share their work with the world.”
As the company mentioned above, Instagram and Giphy already have a close relationship, with Giphy providing built-in sticker functions for the popular picture-sharing app. Giphy also works with other apps outside the Facebook family, including Twitter. Moving forward, Giphy will continue to use its own branding and allow users to keep uploading their own GIFs, while also finding new ways to integrate deeper into Instagram. Facebook, in its blog post, added: “GIFs and stickers give people meaningful and creative ways to express themselves.”
Giphy has raised about $151 million since first launching in 2013, according to Crunchbase. As of 2018, the New York City-based company said it had 300 million daily active users and 12 billion GIF searches per month.