page_title: Giphy
section_title: Beginnings and early history
hierarchical_section_title: Giphy / History / Beginnings and early history
caption_attribution_description: Founder of Giphy, Alex Chung at SXSW in Austin, Texas.
context_page_description: Giphy, styled as GIPHY, is an American online database and search engine that allows users to search for and share short looping videos with no sound, that resemble animated GIF files. On 15 May 2020, Giphy was acquired by Facebook for a reported $400 million.
context_section_description: Giphy was founded by Alex Chung and Jace Cooke in February 2013. The idea for the business came when the pair was having breakfast, musing on the rising trend of purely visual communication.
  When Chung and Cooke first launched Giphy, the website functioned solely as a search engine for GIFs.  According to Chung, Giphy attracted around a million users during its first week and the figure leveled out to 300,000.
  Giphy features what its founders called as "conversational search" wherein contents are brought to users' conversations through a search box found in their messaging applications.
caption: Co-founder Alex Chung at South by Southwest 2016
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