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Tell me the history of Giphy -- areas of interest include growth #'s over time (users, gifs shared or whatever metric they highlight), successive funding, articles about the company, number of employees, key employees, etc.
Hello! Thanks for your question about the history of Giphy. The short answer is that Giphy was launched in 2013 by Alex Chung and Jace Cooke and has since grown to have more than 100 million daily active users sharing 1 billion GIFs. You'll find a deep dive of my research below.
METHODOLOGY
To respond to your request, I searched through corporate websites, trusted media sites, industry reports, and blogs and articles written by industry experts. Moreover, I used Crunchbase to find a historical timeline of Giphy as a company. In addition, I used data analytics sources such as Alexa, SimilarWeb, and Mobbo to get some data on Giphy.
INSIGHTS
As I mentioned above, Giphy was launched in 2013 by Alex Chung and Jace Cooke, who "both couldn’t get over how cumbersome it still was to find and share GIFs, and thought we could do something about it." Cooke was known for his work on the startup Hot Potato, which was acquired by Facebook in 2010, and Chung co-founded the startup Fridge, which was acquired by Google. The initial launch of the website, at which time the database contained around 15,000 GIFs, brought in 30,000 visitors in the first weekend. Despite the heavy traffic, initial reviews of the website were mixed, with Gizmodo calling it "hilariously bad." The advantage of the initial website was speed; it was designed so that the GIFs would load quickly and easily. The disadvantage was that it had very few sharing options originally, and no mobile website or mobile app. Still, these challenges didn't keep the site from reaching 3 million monthly visits by May 2013. By that point, there were a couple hundred thousand GIFs in the database, with plans to reach 1 million GIFs in the next month.
Since then, Giphy has evolved rapidly. It has launched several successful mobile apps and is integrated with just about every social channel. The service averages 100 million daily active users sharing an average of 1 billion GIFs per day and watching more than 2 million hours of GIFs per day, collectively. Here's a brief timeline of how Giphy got from point A to point B:
May 2014: $2.5 million Series A funding round
January 2015: $21.5 million Series B funding round, valuation of $80 million.
March 2015: Acquired Nutmeg.
February 2016: $55 million Series C funding round, valuation $245 million.
April 2016: Acquires Giphy Capture.
October 2016: $72 million Series D funding round, $528 million valuation.
March 2017: Acquired imoji.
In terms of employees, Giphy started out with just the two founders, Chung and Cooke, who were not even working full-time on the project, initially. Since then, the company has grown massively. To give you an idea, here is a list of just some of the key employees:
Adam Leibsohn, COO
Clare Macgoey, CFO
Andrea Wagner, Director of Partnerships
Andy Hin, Director of Product
Bassem Ali, Director of Engineering
Collin Berger, Director of Engineering
Caroline Huber, Director of WEb Products
Dan Finkler, Director of Platform Engineering
Dani Newman, Community Director
David Rosenberg, Director of Business Development
Jillian Fisher, Director of Mobile Products
Jason Stein, Director of Business Development
Jess Gilliam, Brand Creative Director
Julie Logan, Director of Brand Strategy
Juliana Ossa, Director of Design
Jonny McLaughlin, Director of Engineering
Nick Hasty, Director of Engineering
Nam Nguyen, Director of Platform Product
Lauren Saltzman, Director of Finance
Ralph Bishop, Director of Design
Randy shepherd, Director of Engineering
REbekah Huber, Director of Partnerships
Romy Zipken, Director of Operations
Tom Smith, Director of Product
Samuel Wang, Director of Engineering
Simon Gibson, Director of Marketing
Tyler Menzel, Editorial Director
Utah Ingersoll, Director of Engineering
Yo Kim, Content Strategy Director
Finally, I'll go over some current analytics on Giphy's website and mobile apps. The Alexa rank for Giphy is 173 for the US, and 283 globally. For the website, 30% of the visitors are from the US. The website has nearly 40 million daily unique visitors, with 1.2 billion monthly. Most of the website's traffic comes from social channels, and most of the rest is either from search engines or direct. It's difficult to find data on iOS apps, but the Android Giphy app has over 17 million installs. It hass 720,000 weekly active users, and 1.8 million monthly active users.
CONCLUSION
To wrap up, Giphy was launched in 2013 by Alex Chung and Jace Cooke and has since grown to have more than 100 million daily active users sharing 1 billion GIFs. I hope this information is helpful to you! Thanks for using Wonder, and let us know if we can help you with anything else.