KLIPY raises $3.8M seed and joins Google's AI Futures Fund to build the expression layer for GIFs, memes and AI media
What's the deal? KLIPYDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, an enterprise-grade expression API platform, has raised $3.8M in seed funding and joined Google's AI Futures Fund. The round included I2BF, Silvercircle VC, Sturgeon CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Red Swan Ventures, Intuition VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Capra Ventures, and former NBA champion Zaza Pachulia.
The San Francisco-based company helps developers integrate GIFs, memes, stickers, clips, and AI-generated media into apps like BeReal, Baidu, Canva, Figma, and Microsoft SwiftKey. It also gives creators, brands, and rights holders tools to distribute and control expressive content across platforms.
KLIPY was founded by serial entrepreneurs Givi Beridze, Frank Nawabi, and Waska Chaduneli. Nawabi previously built Tenor, the GIF-sharing platform acquired by Google in 2018 that scaled to over a billion users.
Why now? Visual communication — memes, GIFs, short-form clips — is booming, especially among Gen Z and Gen Alpha. AI is accelerating that trend by making content creation faster and easier.
"While internet culture moves at lightning speed, memes possess surprising staying power," said CEO Beridze. "Brands are realising that they are an authentic way to join the conversation and keep their franchises relevant."
Nearly 10,000 developers and 40,000 creators already use KLIPY's API, which processes billions of requests weekly. The company is also building monetisation infrastructure, including contextual ad tools that help partner apps create new revenue streams.
What could go wrong? KLIPY operates in a space dominated by incumbents — Tenor (now Google) and Giphy (now Shutterstock). Convincing platforms to migrate or adopt a newer player requires proving reliability at scale and offering something the giants don't.
Content rights and moderation present another challenge. As AI-generated expression proliferates, managing copyright, brand safety, and harmful content will only grow more complex.
The signal: KLIPY's seed round draws a notably diverse investor base — from frontier-market specialist Sturgeon Capital to Google's AI Futures Fund — reflecting broad conviction that expressive media infrastructure is an emerging category in its own right. With co-founder Nawabi's Tenor playbook as a template, the bet is that an independent, API-first platform can carve out space between the incumbents by bundling search, AI generation, and monetisation in ways that Giphy and Tenor, now folded into larger parent companies, have been slow to offer.
