Giphy

Company overview. Giphy, Inc. (stylized GIPHY) is a New York City–based company founded in 2013 by Alex Chung and Jace Cooke. It was privately held with roughly $150 million in venture funding until Facebook (now Meta Platforms) acquired it in May 2020 for a reported ~$400 million. After the UK Competition and Markets Authority ordered Meta to divest it, Shutterstock, Inc. (NYSE: SSTK) acquired all of Giphy's shares in June 2023 for $53 million in net cash. Giphy is now a subsidiary of Shutterstock. Its standalone revenue has been minimal — Shutterstock's 10-Q recorded roughly $5 million in Giphy-related revenue for the first nine months after the 2023 acquisition — and specific employee counts are not publicly disclosed.

Products / services / operations. Giphy operates one of the internet's largest libraries of GIFs and stickers, providing a search engine, embeddable content, and an API that supplies casual conversational media to social networks, messaging apps, and web services. Its content (including licensed material from media brands such as Disney and Netflix) is integrated into platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, Microsoft Teams, and others; Shutterstock has said Giphy reaches roughly 1.7 billion daily users. Giphy is a true operating company, not a patent-holding shell.

Patent-litigation posture. Giphy is an operating company appearing as a defendant: 1 tracked case, 0 as plaintiff. Its sole tracked appearance is VideoLabs, Inc. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. et al., filed May 24, 2022, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. Giphy was named as a Meta subsidiary defendant alongside Meta, Facebook Technologies, Instagram, and WhatsApp. There is no venue clustering in the Eastern District of Texas; the case sits in Delaware.

Notable cases / context. The Delaware suit was brought by VideoLabs, Inc. and VL Collective IP LLC, a Palo Alto–based patent-licensing platform asserting video-technology patents it acquired from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Siemens AG, and Panasonic — covering H.264 video compression, adaptive playback, secure real-time transmission, and object detection. In April 2024 the court dismissed claims on one patent as abstract-ineligible while upholding another. Giphy was sued while still a Meta subsidiary, and the parties resolved the dispute in October 2025, with claims dismissed.