Sounds like Facebook loves GIFs almost as much as we do. On Friday, Axios reported that Facebook has agreed to buy Giphy for around $400 million, although the terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

According to Axios’ sources close to the situation, they are expected to keep their own branding and mainly be integrated into Instagram where it’s search and sticker functions are already built-in. Sounds like Giphy will be built into Facebook’s other apps too through existing and additional integrations.

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane with Giphy. It was founded in February 2013 by Alex Chung and Jace Cooke, apparently they were chatting over breakfast and came up with the idea.

By August 2013, Giphy evolved from being a search engine to a production tool. It started to allow users to post, embed and share GIFs on Facebook and soon after, they integrated with Twitter.

In 2015, Giphy acquired Nutmeg, a GIF messaging service, taking series steps towards mobile domination.

In 2016 they crossed the 100 million user mark, serving over 1 billion GIFs a day. That number doubled a year later. They also launched GIF Maker and Giphy Capture to allow anyone to turn videos or anything on their screen into GIFs.

In 2017, they even started getting into AR with Giphy World. More recently, Giphy started pursuing ad monetization concepts before ultimately getting scooped up by Facebook.

It'll be interesting to see if Giphy changes Instagram the same way Bitmoji changed Snapchat. 🤔

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