Who co-founded Giphy with Alex Chung?

Jace Cooke co-founded Giphy with Alex Chung.

Giphy was founded in February 2013 after Chung and Cooke discussed the growing role of purely visual communication. Their initial product was not the broad social platform familiar today, but a searchable online index of animated GIFs.

The service quickly attracted attention: according to accounts cited in Giphy's history, it reached about one million users during its first week before settling at roughly 300,000 users. It later expanded to let people post, embed, and share GIFs through services such as Facebook and Twitter.

A common mix-up is treating Giphy as merely a file-hosting site. Its central idea was searchable GIF discovery, later extended through messaging integrations, creator profiles, stickers, and short video clips. Giphy was acquired by Meta in 2020 and later sold to Shutterstock, with that sale completed in 2023.