Facebook is acquiring Giphy, the popular GIF sharing platform. Giphy, founded in 2013, has become a leading platform for sharing GIFs in recent years.

It is now being acquired by Facebook. The company is not revealing exactly how much it’s paying to acquire Giphy, but Axios claims that the acquisition is costing Facebook $400 million.

Axios notes that Giphy’s most recent private valuation was roughly $600 million. The companies had started discussing a potential partnership before the COVID-19 pandemic.

As part of the acquisition, Giphy will be joining the Instagram team at Facebook. Giphy already powers Instagram’s GIF-related features, by the way. Giphy has a pretty extraordinary library of GIFs and it even works with artists and popular brands to make some really unique GIFs.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, tweeted:

Visual expression is so important in how we communicate, and GIPHY understands that like no other. Excited to bring their creativity and talent together with ours. Welcome to the family GIPHY! pic.twitter.com/JRIQ57wdMM

— Adam Mosseri 😷 (@mosseri) May 15, 2020

Giphy also makes its GIFs available to third-party apps via an official API, and it is used in lots of popular apps such as Twitter, Slack, etc. The report claims that Giphy will continue to retain its own branding after the acquisition. Giphy confirmed on a blog post that the company will continue to make its API available to third-party developers going forward.

Tagged with Facebook, Giphy