Betaworks-Backed Giphy Lands $17 Million Series B Led By Lightspeed Venture Partners

Giphy has just raised $17 million in Series B funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from General Catalyst and previous investors such as Lerer-Hippeau, betaworks, RRE Ventures, and CAA Ventures.

The investment values Giphy at $80 million, according to a report from Business Insider.

Giphy is a search engine for gifs, put simply. The company tags gifs to certain categories or with various keywords to make finding the perfect gif that much easier.

And beyond that, Giphy ensures that artists are credited for their works and offers distribution tools to help spread the word. For example, Giphy launched a link shortener that automatically embeds a clickable gif into tweets instead of taking up characters with the gif link and the intended hyperlink.

The company launched out of betaworks in the same class as Dots and Poncho in April 2013, and has since gone on to raise a $2.5 million Series A alongside this recent $17 million Series B.

The team still works out of the betaworks office in NY.

We’ve reached out to the Giphy team and are working on getting more information.

Developing…

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