Giphy quietly acquired imoji last year to build out its emoji and sticker business
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch : Tweets: @aaronklein and @hallstephenj Tweets: Aaron Klein / @aaronklein : If anyone awoke from a 20-year coma and read this tweet, they'd ask to be put back in the coma. http://twitter.com/... Stephen Hall / @hallstephenj : “emoji sticker business” is just such a funny collection of words http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Giphy's quiet purchase of imoji is the second time the company has folded a small mobile app into its platform without much fanfare — it had already acquired GIF messaging app Nutmeg in 2015 as part of its mobile push. The imoji deal only surfaced a year later, by which point the emoji-and-sticker layer was becoming a distinct business next to GIF search.
The acquisition fits the arc traced across the coverage: Giphy Studios' original-content push in 2016, the company weighing revenue models on the back of $150M raised and 150M+ daily users in mid-2017, and then shipping its own sticker-making tool and keyboard extension on iOS at the end of 2018 — exactly the surface area imoji was bought to supply.
First-order effects
- Giphy gains imoji's sticker-creation technology outright, giving it an in-house answer to user-made stickers rather than relying solely on licensed or scraped content.
- imoji's team and tech are absorbed into Giphy's product roadmap ahead of the iOS sticker tool and keyboard work that followed.
Second-order effects
- Rival sticker platforms are forced to compete on distribution: Emogi's $12.6M raise to expand its SDK for keyboards shows investors funding the same keyboard-and-messaging real estate Giphy is building natively.
- With $150M raised and no settled revenue model, Giphy's ownership of both search and creation tools strengthens its position to monetize stickers inside messaging apps rather than paying for placement.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — buy small creation apps, integrate into one distribution pipe — messaging-expression consolidates around a few platforms that own the full stack from creation to search to keyboard delivery, squeezing standalone sticker startups toward acquisition or SDK commoditization.
The trend: Messaging-expression tools are consolidating: GIF and sticker platforms are acquiring creation apps to own the whole pipeline from making to sharing inside keyboards and chat apps.