Riffsy scores $3.5M because the world truly wants a GIF iOS keyboard

GIFs have officially joined the national economy.

No, really — Riffsy, the maker of a popular GIF keyboard for iOS 8, is announcing that it has raised $3.5 million in funding from some pretty solid investors.

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Riffsy’s team actually got started with a GIF-making and -sharing app back in February/March, but got the idea of making a keyboard after Apple announced that iOS 8 would support custom keyboards. The keyboard can be used to send GIFs through text message, iMessage, Twitter, and email.

“One of the things we were seeing is that the actual sharing piece is still challenging,” said Riffsy cofounder and chief executive David McIntosh in an interview with VentureBeat. To remedy that, he and his team created the keyboard to make the sharing as convenient as possible. McIntosh said that users went from sending a couple of GIFs per week to sending five or six per day once the keyboard came out.

While it might sound silly that a company has built a GIF product and it’s somehow raised a pretty good amount of seed funding, Riffsy’s team has much bigger aspirations.

Beyond the keyboard as it is, the team wants to eventually add ways for users to personalize their keyboards and GIF libraries, be able to pull from their own photos and videos, and eventually even store their libraries in the cloud and be able to access them from multiple devices.

“Ultimately, we’d like to build a self-expression network around motion,” he said. To McIntosh, GIFs are the mobile equivalent to YouTube videos. Just as we embed those videos on desktop, when interacting with others, GIFs are “the video embed for the mobile era,” he said.

Creating GIFs out of a user’s own photos or videos can enable them create “personal memes” and express themselves with content they’ve created.

Though McIntosh says the company is currently focused on its product and growing its user base and not on monetization, the plan will eventually be to bring in revenue through branded and sponsored content. After all, Riffsy has access to a large number of users’ messaging interfaces, and supplies them with content to share with others — what brand wouldn’t want a piece of that?

Riffsy’s keyboard is currently available for iOS 8 and has been downloaded one million times so far (McIntosh declined to share active user numbers but said the keyboard is opened millions of times every day).

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The company is funded by Redpoint Ventures, Initial Capital, and John Riccitiello. Riffsy was founded in February 2014 and is based in Berkeley, Calif.