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Tell me the history of bitmoji -- areas of interest include growth #'s over time (users, avatars created or whatever metric they highlight), successive funding, articles about the company, number of employees, key employees, etc.
Hello, and thank you for your request for a history and examination of the growth of Bitmoji. The most useful sources were The New York Times and the Financial Post.
In short, Bitmoji is a product of comic-creation app Bitstrips. Bitstrips, which launched in 2007, received a total of $11 million in funding between 2013 and 2014. Bitmoji, which allows users to create customized caricatures of themselves, launched as a standalone app in 2014. In 2016, Bitstrips was bought by Snap for $62.4 million. All 26 employees of the company, including co-founders Jacob Blackstock and Shahan Panth signed employment agreements with Snap. Bitmoji is the fastest growing app in the US, showing a 5,000% increase in unique monthly visitors in the past two years.
HISTORY
Toronto-based Bitstrips, the comic-creation app which was founded in October of 2007, makes Bitmoji. The company's other products include Bitstrips.com, Bitstrips for Schools, and the Bistrips mobile app.
In 2013, Bitstrips launched an extension on Facebook that "let users create personalized comic strips using their profile pictures, and the pictures of their Facebook friends," according to the Daily Mail. It became so ubiquitous on the platform that many felt they were getting spammed. In October of 2013, BuzzFeed even published an article on how to block Bitstrips. CNBC says that "tech news site Virtuaniz called it 'the hated Facebook spam.'"
Bitmoji, launched in 2014 as a standalone iPhone app, has overcome the reputation of its predecessor Bitstrips. The New York Times says "the true brilliance of Bitmoji...is that whether we admit it or not, we often reduce the world around us (ourselves, our friends, our co-workers) into digestible, cartoonish caricatures...And now Bitmoji has done the heavy lifting for us, marrying our own sense of self with our public image, yet in a safe, quirky way that we ultimately control."
CNBC describes Bitmoji as "a free app that lets users personalize emojis and share them with friends through text messages, Facebook Messenger and even on Slack." The Financial Post describes the app this way: "users build their own personal cartoon caricatures, which they can then use in messaging or chat apps to express various emotions with one another, rather than with traditional smiley or frowning face emojis." Bitstrips says the Bitmoji app "gives you a visual identity you can use anywhere to express yourself in ways that words can’t capture."
In an article with the New York Times, co-founder Shahan Panth says "the app is all about emotion, and it’s you, and you’re expressing all these emotions." Users select from a variety of clothing, hair styles, facial features, activities, and scenes to create their ideal virtual self. Panth goes on to tell the Times that "these avatars are like your id, and that can take any form...When we talk about letting you be the embodiment of your essential form, that doesn’t necessarily have to be literal. The essential form of you could be a green alien.”
Google named Bitmoji one of the best apps of 2014 and celebrities like Lena Dunham, Seth Rogan and Victoria Beckham have embraced the app. As of 2015, the app was releasing six new Bitmoji per week and the most popular were "greetings and affirmative replies (Yes, O.K., LOL)," according to the New York Times.
Bitmoji has joined forces with a number of brands including Pixar (in conjunction with the release of "Inside Out"). Clothing and shoe brands, including Steve Madden, Foot Locker and Forever 21 "established virtual catalogs" within the app, according to CNBC. They also partnered with designer Tanya Taylor in 2015 to help expand the women's fashion offerings so women could find just the right look for their avatars.
In March of 2016, Snap purchased Bitmoji and parent company Bitstrips for $64.2 million. The Financial Post reported in July of 2016 that "all members of the Bitstrips team accepted offers to work at Snapchat and will remain based in Toronto."
Within four months of the purchase, NBC reports that "Snapchat users could add Bitmojis to their chats," according to CNBC. Midia Research, in its analysis of the deal says, "the ability to use Bitmoji’s in snaps is...almost guaranteed to be welcomed by the app’s user-base and their format presents opportunity for brands to interact with Snapchat’s audience in the same way lenses convey messages without interrupting use...Bitmoji could be the key that unlocks a lucrative future for Snapchat."
FUNDING
In 2009, Bitstrips was named a finalist for Facebook's fbFund incubator. The company did not ultimately receive an investment from Facebook.
Between 2013 and 2014, the company received $11 million in funding:
>Late 2014 - $8 million Series B from Horizons and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. This led to the launch of the standalone Bitmoji app.
EMPLOYEES
Both Crunchbase and LinkedIn report that Bitstrips, creator of Bitmoji, have between 5-10 employees. LinkedIn shows 26 people currently employed in some capacity by Bitstrips or Bitmoji.
>Co-founder, CEO and Creative Director Jacob Blackstock is a Canadian "who started as a cartoonist and animator and goes by the nickname Ba," according to the New York Times.
>Shahan Panth is Bitmoji's co-founder and VP of Marketing. Blackstock and Panth have been friends since high school.
>Other key employees include: Matt Grantham (Lead Designer), Peter Kuczera (Sr. DevOps Engineer), Rudolf Cheng (iOS Developer) and Antonio Tari (Android Team Leader, Sr. Software Engineer).
USERS
Bitstrips launched on Facebook in December of 2012. By July of 2013, the company says 10 million avatars were created. CNBC reports that the Bitmoji app "shot into the top 35 iPhone apps in March 2015 after launching on Facebook Messenger, enabling users to add their cartoon selves in messages to friends and family members."
Four months after Bitmoji launched on the Snapchat platform, "the app instantly jumped from hovering between the top 50 and 100 on the iPhone to the top five on iOS and top 10 on Google Play," according to CNBC. As of February of 2017, Bitmoji was the highest ranked free app for the iPhone, followed by Snapchat. Recode says "Bitmoji is [now] the No. 1 most-downloaded app in five top markets: The U.S., U.K., France, Canada and Australia." Snap reported that more than 60% of daily Snaps use Bitmojis, geofilters and lenses.
According to a 2016 LA Times article, Bitstrips has not released usage numbers for Bitmoji. However, Axios reported in March of 2017, "Bitmoji is the fastest growing app in America, per comScore, with a more than 5000% increase in unique monthly visitors over the past two years." MediaPost says this "amounted to more than 10 million unique visitors on a monthly basis."
RECENT PRESS
Most of the recent press (within the past year) has been around Snap's purchase of Bitstips and the growth of Bitmoji. I have linked three such articles here.
Feb 3, 2017: TechCrunch reports on Snap's release of transaction details for the purchase of Bitstrips.
CONCLUSION
To sum it up, Bitmoji's creator, Bitstrips, which launched in 2007, received a total of $11 in funding. In 2016, Bitstrips was bought by Snap for $62.4 million. All 26 employees of the company, including co-founders Jacob Blackstock and Shahan Panth signed employment agreements with Snap. Bitmoji, which allows users to create customized caricatures of themselves, launched as a standalone app in 2014 and as of 2017 is the fastest growing app in the US, showing a 5,000% increase in unique monthly visitors in the past two years.
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