Giphy Raises Its Value To $600 Million

Giphy, the search engine for animated images, aka GIFs, has managed to raise an additional $72 million in funding, effectively raising its value to $600 million. According to a report published by the Wall Street Journal, the GIF making site was able to attract new investments from parties such as Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Institutional Venture Partners, China Media Capital, and other current backers.

Giphy is reporting plenty of good news lately. A week ago, the New York based company revealed that after three years of existence, its website has provided GIFs that are viewed by more than a hundred million users on a daily basis. Moreover, Giphy stated that to date, it serves about a billion GIFs every day mainly by way of its search engine, mobile apps, and partnerships it struck with Viacom, Disney, and Major League Baseball. 

But evidently, there is more work to be done. As explained by Adam Leibsohn, the chief operating officer of Giphy, the company is planning to funnel the additional investment it has received to further strengthening its existing staff as well as enhancing its current technical capabilities. Also, the startup is also looking into ways in which it can improve its revenue stream. Users might think there already is a GIF for everything, but for Giphy, the sky is literally the limit. It says it is planning to further diversify and deepen its current library of animated images, with a renewed commitment to adding new GIFs related to sports, news and current events, and of course, entertainment.

As noted by Leibsohn, Giphy wants to be the YouTube of GIFs. In other words, when people think of GIFs, they automatically think of Giphy. Of course, the company has not reached that status yet. But the demand is certainly there. With more and more people are becoming reliant on smartphones and tablets these days, the battleground is now on mobile. Also, the rise of social media has made the sharing of GIFs more frequent, with most users, especially those belonging to the younger generation, more likely to use GIFs when reacting to any news as they do with emoji.

But there is fierce competition up ahead. Perhaps Giphy’s toughest rival is Gfycat, which managed to raise $10 million in funding almost a couple of months ago. Then there is Tenor Inc, which also raised around $15 million in funding, and is more focused on delivering GIFs that are more user friendly as used on mobile devices.